Protocol Online cognitive training for people with cognitive impairment following SARS-CoV-2 infection: A randomised controlled clinical trial, 2024, Corbett

Sort of. Except they're not talking about ramping up the cognitive exercises over time, are they? So maybe it's more "exercise for the brain" regardless of symptoms?

 

But it's literally not. This nonsense is widely believed, including by people who dismiss all the biological evidence for ME/CFS and will gleefully point out how it contradicts some of the things they know about biology, and then they literally go "brain matter is just like muscle matter" when it's freaking not! This is not some minor detail.

It doesn't even make sense of things either. They don't bother taking patient history into account. No one with Long Covid just shut down their thinking for months anymore than all of us spent weeks bedbound. And even if a small few did, the vast majority did not. They do the most unforgivable error of holding on to their models when the facts contradict them. Real experts throw their models out when the facts contradict them. But here they'll talk nonsense that anyone with a high school biology class knows is wrong while mocking us for sometimes getting a few details wrong, mostly about things that are uncertain or ambiguous.

 

My biggest problem with the study is that I have little idea what they mean by ‘Long Covid.’ I know of people who have brain fog post covid but no other symptoms. I also know plenty of people who have brain fog as part of an illness that looks identical to ME/CFS. Does the same mechanism drive brain fog in those two groups? Would cognitive exercises be mildly helpful for those have brain fog without ME? How about people who have post hospitalisation Long Covid and brain fog? I bet they’ll ignore all of this and generalise the results to Long Covid writ large. Which imo is why we’re going to have a bigg replication crisis in the Long Covid field

 

If thinking harder worked none of us would have had to leave work or school.

 

Interesting article from Medscape on brain training:
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticl...240522_etid6535759&uac=264294PY&impID=6535759

 

"One popular approach is "brain trfaining.""

You know what, just leave it as is. It's perfect.

Although to say that the premise of 'brain retraining' is "use it or lose it" is just false. It's mostly used clinically nowadays to 'treat' cognitive symptoms, which are not the product of 'not using it', which itself is based on the idea of 'brain plasticity', which is used about people who actually did literally 'lose it'. It's mostly just a giant scammy nonsense.

You will never find a better example of "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". Of course if you train people to play the yo-yo every day for years they will be better at playing yo-yo. And who cares?

It's definitely good for people to use diverse skills in a format they enjoy throughout their lives, but for most people this is just not accessible because our economies are built on exploitation, on keeping most people on the edge all the time with no time to spare. Or in our case, they are punitive and built specifically in a way that makes it impossible for us.