Anon on
>>13571 is right, it can be due to diet. People aren’t aware of how much their diet and eating habits can change them. Most believe it only changes the body, but the brain and all involved with it are affected too.
But I think it may only be a case of disuse. Since you’ve become a shut in you probably don’t involve yourself in communicating with other people as much like before. You stopped using (or don’t use as much) the capacities associated with that activity and as much longer you keep yourself from doing it, it gets worst. It’s common to start feeling alienated or unfitting for conversations because your capacity on that as degenerated and your brain can no longer keep up so well for them. If you want to retrieve certain faculties, you have to train them, just like someone wanting to get muscles on their flat arms would have to exercise its arms. The brain is a very adaptive thing and just like it will gain capacities to adapt, it will also lose them if it sees it doesn’t need those capacities anymore. It’s your choice which faculties you want and which ones you don’t by forcing or blocking certain stimuli to your brain and causing development or degeneration of your capacities. It’s a very interesting subject, you can actually cause yourself to go blind by just blocking the stimuli associated with it even if your eyes are perfectly healthy.
Something similar to your situation happened to me and I too started to have problems in understanding people well, but after making efforts to talk to other people and at memorizing information, and study a bit on communication techniques, I got better than I was before. It’s funny that you say it makes you feel like an old man as disuse of physical and mental abilities is extremely common on elderly people. I hope you too manage to get better (^u^)
