Article: How novelist Mark Haddon found his way through brain fog — brainhealth.com

Chandelier

Chandelier

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
www.brainhealth.com

How novelist Mark Haddon found his way through brain fog

After heart surgery and then long COVID clouded the mind that produced The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the British author discovered unexpected ways back to a creative life.
www.brainhealth.com www.brainhealth.com
2100-word article. Mentions PEM, contains advice to pace and to listen to your own body.


How novelist Mark Haddon found his way through brain fog​

After heart surgery and then long COVID clouded the mind that produced The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the British author discovered unexpected ways back to a creative life.​
​
By Gina Shaw​
October 5, 2026​
​

 
What Haddon discovered was that not all of his creative abilities were equally affected. His ability to recall words was damaged, but pictures were not. “I’m very good at imagining three-dimensional objects,” he says. “It was intensely pleasurable to make things in my mind’s eye—shape them, turn them, rotate them—because you can hold one object and operate on that one object. You don’t have to think months, years, pages ahead. And that gave me a way of feeling creative and putting something out in the world.”
Click to expand...
Interestingly (or not), my ME/CFS onset seems to have produced significant aphantasia - it is extremely difficult for me to produce and hold mental images in my mind. This was a new development and a really dramatic shift. In a previous life, I worked in graphic design for a while and spent a great deal of my free time engaged in various visual arts - I spent a lot of time picturing things. I can't do that now and attempting to do so seems to be the quickest way to break my brain and induce shut-down (and subsequently PEM). Oddly, I haven't totally lost the ability to draw, though I am severely limited in the amount of time I can spend on doing it, but I need to do so without any degree of pre-visualization. It is exceedingly strange to me and I am not quite certain how to explain it; I can think "I will draw a cat" and then sort build the cat on the page bit-by-bit, but I cannot picture the cat that I am going to draw in advance or I will start to shut down. I hate it.

Haddon jokes that he has become one of the world’s experts on the placebo effect, having tried nearly everything for his long COVID—including, recently, a remedy he calls “slightly bonkers” and declines to name until he’s sure it’s working. Whatever the mechanism, he is running again and writing 500 to 1,000 words a day. “If it is the placebo effect, I’m surfing that wave as far as I can,” he says.
Click to expand...
Sigh.


I sincerely wish Mark Haddon the best and am glad he seems to be improving, but this is yet another report that mostly just makes me want to scream. Unable to do so, I retreat further into despair.
 
DHagen said:
my ME/CFS onset seems to have produced significant aphantasia - it is extremely difficult for me to produce and hold mental images in my mind.
Click to expand...
Same here. It's really noticeable when I try to meditate the way I used to (picturing thoughts as passing clouds, or as fish in a pond etc.) and the attempt to try and conjure/hold onto that image feels somewhere between impossible, extremely mentally taxing or almost painful. Not conducive to meditation at all.

Used to do art as well. Like you said, I can still occasionally draw/paint by just not doing any pre-visualization.
 
Ive struggled with more and more aphantasia since definite ME onset, and some degree since prodromal symptoms. Now I am severe I can voluntarily picture say, an apple only in a fuzzy way unless I really focus. But remember images in memories etc strongly. Partner has much worse aphantasia and doesn't think in images anymore mostly.

I also get strong hypogogic hallucinationatory images as I'm falling asleep since becoming severe.
 
DHagen said:
Interestingly (or not), my ME/CFS onset seems to have produced significant aphantasia - it is extremely difficult for me to produce and hold mental images in my mind.
Click to expand...
Similar for me. I've experienced very vivid visualizations just before sleep sometimes while still conscious, and I think it would be so neat if I could do that all that time.

Might be why I have almost no drawing ability.

Edit: I can't really remember if it got worse with ME/CFS onset. I don't think it's ever been very vivid though. But I also think I had something like very mild ME/CFS even when much younger.
 
Same here, though I don't think I'm as bad as some as I didn't notice it until, about eight years after I first got ill, I was at an ante-natal class. At the end we had to relax by imagining we were on a beach in the tropics. One father found it so relaxing he started snoring but I just got a bit iller, tired and cross trying to hold the image in my mind.

I can still picture things a bit but they're usually quite vague and fleeting. It's difficult to know what would otherwise be normal for me but I do remember, many years ago now, when it was important for me to do well at a fourth year history exam at school (I wanted to give the subject up but take it up again for A level) and I put more effort than usual into revising. I was quite surprised when it came to the exam that I could actually picture the pages of my exercise book and the words written on them. Of course, a fifteen year old brain works much better than one in its fifties, so not a very useful comparison.
 
If I spend time thinking about level 4 CEV then I can usually will one to happen, but I find them a bit disturbing so I don’t do it.
Much happier with patterns than recognisible scenes.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom