Thinking with the foggy space between

Abstract

David Bissell encourages geographers to think with brain fog. In response to this, recalling work in ‘mental health geographies’ and specifically ‘geographies of delusion’, I engage with Bissell's call to consider potential empathetic solidarities with people who experience disabling neurodiversity. I suggest that geographers might listen carefully to the voices of people who dwell in fog, not to romanticise their unintentionally dissonant geographies, but instead to seek co-produced routes through which it might be possible to help moor disrupted senses of self.

Introduction

According to the U.K. Met Office, fog is one of the trickiest weather phenomena to forecast. On the website (https://weather.metoffice.gov.uk/learn-about/weather/types-of-weather/fog) fog is defined as ‘obscurity in the surface layers of the atmosphere, which is caused by a suspension of water droplets’. This technical definition is also given in spatial parameters: ‘fog is the name given to resulting visibility less than 1 km’, although in forecasts for the public in everyday life this generally refers to ‘visibility less than 180 m’. It seems that fog makes it difficult to see things around us. This lack of visibility comes with certain warnings attached. The Met Office warn: ‘If you really cannot see, you should consider stopping until it is safe to continue’. These meteorological observations are ones held in mind as I think with David Bissell's moving paper about ‘brain fog’. Fog has certain characteristics which implicate lived geographies and hold potential dangers, partly as we cannot see things around us or ways forward.

Bissell's account helps us understand something of the disruptive capacity of fog. A brain fog can be imagined in ways as limiting as atmospheric fog, but also in profoundly private ways. Medically, brain fog is recognised as a diagnostic symptom across various conditions, invoking a recent ‘brain fog scale’ (Debowska et al., 2024) and ‘calls to action’ (Haywood et al., 2025), including in mental ill-health fields, as many studies note the association between depression and seemingly depleted states of cognition. Although brain fog is only explicitly mentioned occasionally in this context, one mental health clinician argues that it is important to distinguish between types of fog (melancholic depression) and mist (non-melancholic depression) by asking patients what brain fog feels like. The most affected (foggy) patients are then reported to state:

My brain feels fuzzy.

My thinking is cloudy.

I’t's hard for me to form thoughts and sentences and also follow conversation.

If foggy things like these are said, then it seems, at least for this clinician, that depression can be seen, ironically enough, more clearly (Parker, 2022). Such testimonies certainly chime with Bissell's (2025: 2) view that brain fog ‘is an embodiment characterised by difficulty thinking, a lack of mental lucidity, an inability to focus, and impaired memory’. Critically, as Bissell notes, such experiences are ones that we often overlook in disciplinary contexts, arguing that ‘most of our current geographical accounts of bodily experience conjure a version of our being in the world as present, engaged, and capacious’. Considering the observations above, I will respond to Bissell's invitation to think with brain fog. In doing so, I draw on my work as a geographer of mental (ill) health and my own efforts to take seriously the gaps between consensual and private reality, an unintentionally dissonant cognitive space that might be described as a ‘foggy in-between’.

Delusional geographies

To illustrate, I will briefly reference a past paper on ‘delusional geographies’ (Parr, 1999), wherein I focussed on narrated experiences of people with a named mental illness and their ‘hazy experiential mesh between the conscious and unconscious, irreducible to either’ (Parr, 1999: 674). It is to this haze that I now return, prompted by Bissell's provocative work, revisiting an uncertain terrain that somehow seems simultaneously familiar, challenging, new and important.

In the 1999 paper, I sought to write, in a very general way, towards psychoanalytic thinking as a way of framing the disruptive nature of delusion, but more generally I was steering a course that I have repeated many times over the years: to attend to voices of disruptive experience, rather than engaging the gymnastics of theory or diagnostics, in trying to do justice to attendant geographies, acknowledging that ‘few voices from beyond the academy are allowed in to illustrate the (un)conscious blurring, flows, and discontinuities’ (Parr, 1999: 675). Not much seems to have changed, as Bissell (2025: 2) reflects: ‘most of our current geographical accounts of embodiment struggle to accommodate these kinds of altered cognitive experience’. One of the problems in working with such experience is clarifying the distinction between non-clinical and disciplinary purpose, and in my own case I was clear that ‘the aim here is not to pin down nor to explain delusion, but rather to investigate something of the embodied time-space experiences of such phenomena’ (Parr, 1999: 676). Given that Bissell's own work speculates that we might foster ‘new empathetic solidarities between differently situated brain fogged bodies’ (Bissell, 2025: 15), then it might be worth my recounting something of the embodiment of delusion, precisely to agree with Bissell's conclusion that better attending to such challenging mind–body situations involve recognising how ‘such experiences have critical political dimensions’ (Bissell, 2025: 19).

Drawing loosely on Parr (1999), back then I positioned people experiencing delusion as existing in a confusing flow between ‘sane’ and ‘insane’ states. Often people reported feeling dislocated; seeing and hearing things that others cannot, sometimes feeling possessed or controlled or unbounded, in a ‘disruptive mesh’. I argued that this feeling-state had implications for how people in thrall to delusion experience the scales of body, home and city. Although we cannot understand the experience of brain fog in an exactly similar way, writing of varied foggy geographies does go some way to bridging the gap across to people who do not often dwell in non-consensual reality. Bissel1 (2025: 2) reminds us that brain fog can be ‘banal everyday experience’; and in bringing this experience into view we can perhaps be optimistic about creating grounds for solidarity for those who spend significant parts of their lives in non-consensual reality. One arguably does not (just) have to be experiencing a delusional mental illness to imagine and empathise with the foggy in-between – it can occur in other everyday ways via drunkenness, hangover, addiction, menopause and medication effects, or as part of exhaustion, dysphoria, dream-states and in stress. If we respond to the invitation to think with brain fog, we might find it in more everyday places and situations than we initially expect.

Seeing the (low) light

As we heard earlier, meteorological fog obscures light and visibility and we are often warned of its dangers. More recently, I have been working with people who experience seasonal affective disorder (SAD) (Bodden et al., 2024a, 2024b, 2025) and their lived experience of winter. Narrative accounts of SAD bring not only descriptions of the muzzy affect of low light, but explicit reference to cognitive fog, often brought on by darker days:

If my SAD is very bad, I feel overwhelmed and unable to concentrate with severe brain fog.

This kind of brain fog is temporal, in that seasonal low light in particular months can bring the change, Autumn and Winter flicking the cognitive switch. But such states are also spatial. Like Bissell's sense of being ‘cut off’ (Bissell, 2025: 6), people experiencing SAD bemoan the ‘the sense of isolation that comes in the winter and you feel apart from everybody’. These accounts disclose that the foggy in-between can emanate both from within and without. It is simultaneously an internal and external condition, one fraught with sense of danger for those experiencing SAD:

I sometimes feel a little bit [of] suffocation when I look up at the sky. I feel sometimes that the clouds are coming towards me, and I actually feel as if I can’t breathe, so, that is why I stay indoors and avoid going out.

In times of danger, when thoughts cannot focus, routes or purposes cannot be remembered, and when things cannot be seen because they are not wholly visible to the foggy self, then people with SAD may retreat to familiar spaces and places, perhaps indoors, although admittedly, as Bissell explains, these interiors may also hold little comfort.

The Met Office descriptions tell us that fog is a fluctuating state, one that moves in, dwells, and sometimes dissipates. For those who experience this ebb and flow, this space in-between becomes clearer in new light:

When you’re looking back when you’re feeling a bit better and then you can kind of pinpoint it a bit easier and open up at that point when you’ve come out of the darkness a little bit.

Although at risk here of a god-trick in a powerful ocularcentricism, it seems that visibility is important in these narratives. ‘Looking back’ suggests a kind of visuality, a clarity about where one was, cognitively and physically. Indeed, for those involved in the Living with SAD research programme, we worked via creative practices, when people were well enough, to help participants see available light more clearly and thereby to reappraise the embodied fog of winter (Bodden et al., 2024b). My research with people who experience delusion or SAD suggests that it is possible to make (at least some kind of) narrative sense of foggy spaces of dispossession, displacement and disengagement. There are complicated implications for matters of power and practice in such embodied and emotional geographies, but arguably implications worth pursuing in precisely the manner suggested by Bissell (2025).

Conclusion: A politics and practice of empathetic solidarity

What of those always or still lost in the fog? When considering the disruption of delusional experience, I used political scientist Glass (1989: 212) as he wrote of the terrifying ‘placelessness’ of non-consensual reality: ‘Delusional time and space replace the self-rootedness and identity … the result is a loss of the self's public being, a reversion to private knowledge systems, and most important, a complete loss of the sense of community’ (cited in Parr, 1999: 685). In my original discussion of Glass, I considered the narratives of those experiencing delusion and how, at some points in their experience, they tried – all the time struggling – to anchor themselves meaningfully through engagement with material and social spaces and places. Those rather mundane points were made as gentle cautions about a scholarly celebration of un-boundness and multiple, fluid selves common in the fashionable post-structuralism of the times. (The continuing dangers of ‘romanticising’ being ‘undone’ are also identified by Bissell.) Likewise, and again now, I might conclude that the analysis of dispossession, disengagement and displacement in Bissell's contribution references an exhausting state which ultimately is difficult to witness, interpret and not least embody.

This conclusion is not just a reluctance to get on board with the challenging epistemologies of ‘negative geographies’ (Bissell, 2025: 3), but more representative of my own solidarity with those suffering foggy brains and my wish to help mitigate suffering, rather than simply ‘making it part of the academic project’. As I read Bissell's final line, ‘I sometimes miss being in the world’, with deep empathy and understanding, I find myself advocating a particular kind of politics of knowledge in response. As much as I am attracted as an academic geographer once more to dwell in and with the foggy in-between spaces of disruptive embodied experience, I mostly want this work to do something and, in the very production of knowledge about such states, to help the re-mooring of dislocated selves and bodies perhaps, possibly, sometimes, potentially. This move could be effected simply through the narrative invitation to speak, to be included and listened to, or through the programmes of research activity itself and any attendant biosolidarities that might result (one such example is discussed in Bodden et al., 2025), rather than by enlisting brain fog and other states (just) to furnish abstract argument. I am nonetheless deeply grateful for the paper, which has reminded me about why a scholarly but practice-led geography might matter.