Meet Charlene Williams, a 56-year-old who practices Spanish on her smartphone every day. A language app, she says, helps her manage her post-COVID-19 brain fog. Williams got COVID-19 pneumonia in November 2020, right before Thanksgiving. After a few months of congestion, loss of taste and smell, hair loss, and a significant drop in weight, the long-hauler began to recover but noticed some symptoms still lingered.
The most jarring symptom for her was the brain fog — a prolonged sense of “fuzzy” or sluggish thinking — which she still deals with today. “It was pretty distressing when people noticed it,” she says.
Brain fog can look different person-to-person, but it’s roughly “synonymous and analogous to traumatic brain injury,” says Neilank Jha, a Canadian neurosurgeon who specializes in brain injuries and concussions. For over a decade, some argued that language training could help patients recover from traumatic brain injury, or TBI. Both TBI and certain cases of COVID involve inflammation in the brain, as well as a decrease in plasticity and gray matter volume. In such cases, experts recommend patients enhance neuroplasticity (the brain's ability to morph itself by strengthening or weakening neural connections) while decreasing neuroinflammation via challenging and rehabilitative tasks.
