I think meds have dumbed me down a lot. I used be very good at memorization, I graduated valedictorian of my high school class, "summa cum laude" from my undergraduate university with a B.S. in Microbiology, minoring in chemistry, got an M.S. in Cell & Molecular Biology, researched in the lab, used computer software & learned new software quickly, got 3 or 4 articles published outside of my thesis, one a first author publication (well, was required to have 1 first author publication to graduate with an M.S. from my grad school, so your advising professor made sure you did, but I also got credit on papers, some of which, yes, I had do a part of the research, others in which I basically re-wrote the paper into fluent English. Since I was the only native English speaker in my lab, my advising professor, who was Greek had me proofread every paper they sent out of that lab for publishing before sending it off to a journal for consideration. So I would have to learn details of some research that was not in my area of expertise and used different lab techniques for study. But I had no problem with it. I could need to buy 100 items in a grocery store and remember every single one of them without a list. Now I can go into a store needing 3 items and leave with 1, forgetting what else it was I needed. No exaggeration. I have been on psych meds just over 20 years; I started them at 19, and I'm 40 now. I must lose my cell phone in my own house (and I will know it has to be here because I have not left the house all day) 25 times a day. I couldn't find it by dialing it from the home phone for a long time because it had some issue where you just couldn't increase the volume of the ringer. Then, after having this problem of a quite ringing phone, it occurred to me there must be apps out there with loud ringtones (something the younger me would have thought of after dealing with this issue 1 or 2 days). I finally went and got an app with nothing but super loud ringtones. When my daughter is with me, and my phone rings now, she says it's embarrassing (she's 10 , so she's at that age). But now I can at least call it when I lose it in the house and hear it to locate it. I can't remember words I want to use, so I have to use another word or word the sentence differently, both of which make the sentence very weird. One time, I hadn't even been on meds that long because I was teaching undergraduate microbiology lab in grad school, so I had to be under 25, and my mind blanked; suddenly I could not remember the name of a very commonly used tool in microbiology and especially in undergrad micro lab, which I'd already taught 2 or 3 semesters of until a student said the name and then I remembered. Just this summer, I was typing an email, and I forgot how to spell the word "such".

It'd be interesting if they ever did a study on the dumbing-down effect of psych meds.

I am glad you got good news from the neurologist.