headlines like this send me into existential crisis... and I'm not over stating or being dramatic. It's like I'm getting my death sentence in slow motion... like we know the end from the beginning and makes me wonder why I would go on with certain things in life. ugh. mike... is this my moose?
This is not worthy of an existential crisis. It's worthy of concern, but not a ZOMG freakout. You have to keep in mind that "IQ" is not a robust metric. Lack of sleep blows big holes in performance on standardized tests. Distraction is worse. Any sort of infection can lower IQ. COVID-19 infection does cause measurable gray matter reduction. But then, so does drinking. I'm not a fan of gray matter reduction, but most of these studies pretty much say debilitating disease is debilitating Which should hardly be surprising. Now - is that debilitation permanent? Transitory? Profound? Trivial? Well again, it's a "novel" coronavirus which doesn't mean "exciting and fun" it means "new under the sun" and we're still deep in the fog of war. Get vaccinated. Helps.
When I was on chemo, the drugs would keep me awake for 3 days at a time. I lost the ability to make sense of numbers, alarming for me as a mathematician who can remember tons of numbers because each is like the face of an old friend. I sometimes lost the ability to make sense of time, I could not remember if something happened a day before, a week before, or months, and I could not sequence past events. steve made a short video about that strange experience. After treatment, I slept terribly for a year and my thinking and memory were always foggy. Lack of sleep make a huge impact on my intelligence during that period (however I was extremely production and creative during that time as well. Weird.) I had resigned myself to my condition as my new normal, but my new new normal came around to be my old normal.
My sister's been going through this a bit. She's studying for the MCAT right now, and her scores on practice exams dropped a bit after COVID-19 and haven't recovered as quickly as she wants. She also feels that persistent brain fog, and says it's harder for her to find the words she wants.