🧠 The Invisible Scars: What COVID is Really Doing to Our Brains

Send us a text Want to know more?  See our corrisponding Substack episode. We're living through the largest uncontrolled experiment on human cognition in history, and most people don't even know they're subjects. While the world moved on from pandemic panic to whatever fresh hell dominates this week's news cycle, researchers have been quietly documenting something that should terrify us all: COVID-19 is reshaping our brains in ways we're only beginning to understand. The evidence is mounting, and it's not pretty. "Increased post-COVID-19 behavioral, emotional, and social problems in Taiwanese children." (Shang et al., 2025) "SARS-CoV-2 is associated with changes in brain structure in UK Biobank" (Douaud et al., Nature, 2022) "Mild COVID Linked to Brain Damage: What That Means for You" (Undated excerpt on brain therapies) Mounting research shows that COVID-19 leaves its mark on the brain, including significant drops in IQ scores" (Al-Aly, The Conversation US) This is Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter.  Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas. Thanks for listening today! Four recurring narratives underlie every episode: boundary dissolution, adaptive complexity, embodied knowledge, and quantum-like uncertainty. These aren’t just philosophical musings but frameworks for understanding our modern world. We hope you continue exploring our other podcasts, responding to the content, and checking out our related articles on the Heliox Podcast on Substack. Support the show About SCZoomers: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1632045180447285 https://x.com/SCZoomers https://mstdn.ca/@SCZoomers https://bsky.app/profile/safety.bsky.app Spoken word, short and sweet, with rhythm and a catchy beat. http://tinyurl.com/stonefolksongs Curated, independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, evidenced-based, clinical & community information regarding COVID-19. Since 2017, it has focused on Covid since Feb 2020, with Multiple Stores per day, hence a large searchable base of stories to date. More than 4000 stories on COVID-19 alone. Hundreds of stories on Climate Change. Zoomers of the Sunshine Coast is a news organization with the advantages of deeply rooted connections within our local community, combined with a provincial, national and global following and exposure. In written form, audio, and video, we provide evidence-based and referenced stories interspersed with curated commentary, satire and humour. We reference where our stories come from and who wrote, published, and even inspired them. Using a social media platform means we have a much higher degree of interaction with our readers than conventional media and provides a significant amplification effect, positively. We expect the same courtesy of other media referencing our stories.