Health Check

Have you lost a loved one who is still a part of your life in some way? Did it leave you feeling confused or frozen about how to continue with life? Claudia Hammond examines the distressing phenomenon known as ambiguous loss – the enormous challenge of dealing with a loss when you aren’t sure what has happened, leaving you searching for answers, unable to move on. What has the pandemic done to our memories? Anecdotally many people report that they keep forgetting things which they are sure they would have remembered before. Psychologist Catherine Loveday of the University of Westminster examines the new emerging evidence. Our brain is formed of two hemispheres and in most of us, the two halves are interconnected by millions of nerve fibres that form a large bridging structure called the corpus callosum. But some babies are born without a corpus callosum, linking the two sides. A quarter of these babies grow up with serious developmental difficulties and half have mild to moderate cognitive problems. But a q