At the time, I was constantly worried that my internet habits had impaired my ability to think and remember things: Spending hours on Twitter, training my brain to absorb and quickly purge thousands of tiny pieces of information, is probably not that healthy. I held out hope, however, that the answer would involve my medication, and that a doctor might recognize my symptoms and suggest some obvious alternative cocktail of SSRIs that would fix the problem.

Specifically, I was worried that Wellbutrin was doing something to my brain: Since I had started taking it in 2018, I noticed myself mixing up words. If I was talking about two conceptssay pizza and footballtheyd be swapped by the time the sentence came out of my mouth; suddenly we were ordering a football for the pizza game. In December 2019, I did something deeply inadvisable that a lot of people inevitably do when they cant get mental health care: I tried managing my own medication, and tapered myself off Wellbutrin slowly. This failed to fix my problem with speaking words aloud and dropped me into a deep depression to boot. I spent much of January in throes of a migraine. It was a relief to finally get in to see a doctor.

Most of my first appointment was pretty standard. I answered questions about my life, my childhood, and my migraines. It was more than two hours long. And because I mentioned this fear about my cognitive abilities, the doctor gave me the MOCA test. When she suggested it, I said, excitedly: The one they gave Trump! They should have committed me on the spot.

The test is, as Wallace said, not hard. You draw a clock face. Youre shown a picture of a lion and you say, Thats a lion. While Trump insisted that his doctors told him that rarely does anybody do what you just did, that makes little sense: The point of the test is not that those who get a perfect score have a perfect brain. A perfect score merely indicates that your brain is functioning within normal parameters. Rather than detecting some superior intellectual agility that might enable a person to paint like Picasso or discover the secret of cold fusion, the MOCA test attests to the possibility that you might be able to open a can of beans without hurting yourself. It confirms mild cognitive impairment, not very stable genius. A passing score is 26 out of 30.

I had a couple of stumbles. On one part of the test, the doctor reads a list of five words, whereupon the patient is asked to repeat them immediately and then repeat them a second time after a few minutes have passed. During my second recital, I forgot one of the words. I also got tripped up on another section where the test-taker is asked to list as many words as they can that begin with the letter F in a minutes time. After saying a few, I found myself taking an increasingly painful amount of time to think of new words to list. I was also thrown by the fact that France didnt count. I didnt realize the MOCA test follows Scrabble rules.

Looking back, I feel like I was struggling with a form of stage fright. I can still recall feeling anxious about the test, and I remember how I questioned everything I did while I was doing it, right down to whether the minute-hand on the clock is the big one or the little one. (Its the big one.) Perhaps I was correct that my brain wasnt working too well at the time; it could also be the case that this extra caution was my brain properly routing its way around the anxiety I was feeling.

As I said and would hasten to emphasize before The New Republic reconsiders my employment, I did pass the test. My psychiatrists conclusion was that my body was under a lot of stress from persistent migraines and that I was severely under-medicated after ditching the Wellbutrin. As Id hoped, she came up with the right pharmacological cocktail and while I cant say I feel that my Internet Brain symptoms have totally subsided, I feel much more chill about them, and I do feel as if I might be able to get a perfect score if I had another go. All thanks to the magic of SSRIs, and possibly also deleting Twitter from my phone.

And yet here I am, left with the fact that I did not get a perfect score on a test that Donald Trump claims to have aced. This is a man who recently seemed to suggest that President Barack Obama deserved a share of blame for the coronavirus outbreak, despite the fact that it didnt exist until hed long left the White House. Prior to that, Trump suggested that we should inject coronavirus patients with bleach and that the key to lowering the rate of infection was to stop testing to see if people were infected.

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I Scored Worse Than Donald Trump Did on That Brain Test - The New Republic