I agree that I ‘feel’ it is a brain problem. But how does all this tie in with PEM? Why delayed?
I think this is exactly the right question. And then the appearance of pem differs quite remarkebly in different persons, not only in time but also in the abilities/feelings that are affected.
I now think it like so: The brain needs to proceed/learn every time again, and all new experiences (walking through a wood, reading a newspaper) need to be compared to older experiences, and everything will get readjusted. And this might probably happen with a lot different timeframes, minutes, hours, days.
A commonly accetpted guess for the mechanism of learning is the "NO-system", and microglia (the immunesystem!) contribute to it. Here something could go wrong.
A long term influence on the microglial NO-productionj is manganese, high manganese will elevate the production, remarkebly under infectious circumstances. I am improving on the (very) long run, years, from a diet with reduced manganese.
A lot of questionmarks remain, but in normal life as well as in science this can not be avoided and needs to be dealed with. Why wouldn´t the huge amount of the immunesystem (microglia account for 10% of all brain cells, and then there are as well 20-40% astrocytes), influence all the lerning-processes in the same manner, in us? Somehow, because it is so complex.