Covid and Noun-Memory Effects

The author, who had a mild Covid infection in late 2022, reports persistent difficulty remembering proper nouns, especially names of actors, authors and not-too-close friends and family, while recall of TV character names and other memory types seems unaffected. Brain fog and fatigue from the infection faded after four to six months, but the noun-recall problem has continued. The author's working hypothesis is that long-term recall of low-emotional-salience narratives has eroded, and that proper nouns suffer most because they have no connection to the content being recalled. The author also suspects this has reduced the use of specific proper nouns in writing, and says some Bluesky and Farcaster users reported similar symptoms.