I want to say sincerely that this exchange is life-changing. I'm old and in rapidly declining physical health. I feel like my brain is working just fine, but the fact of my always-bad memory has been leaving me with the existentially terrifying question "is that going too?"

I realize now I've been having these incidents all my life. Recently I've had the niggling sensation that maybe it's just self-delusion. Nope! Been going on the whole time, just like the lot of you. Thanks for sharing, and I mean that.

A few weeks ago I went to play a piece on the piano. I completely blanked, tried to piece together the intro by ear but wasn't really getting anywhere. My teacher played the intro and then boom, the whole thing was back under my fingers.

The brain really is fascinating.

I went to the shops yesterday and forgot the PIN code for both my cards. I've been typing one of those in for nearly 20 years. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My mum frequently punches in her postal code instead.

Try to remember the finger movements.

Works well until you encounter a new keypad layout (eg when going abroad). I locked my card once like this although I had been typing the code for years before.

Android has this "draw a path through some dots in a grid" analogue to a PIN code. On the boot screen, the grid is a somewhat different size than on the unlock screen. This defeated my muscle memory, and my conscious memory had lost its backup.

This happens to me all the time when playing guitar. I could be there blankly strumming wondering what the notes were, but the moment I get something right, I’ve got it. Or sometimes it’s that I can’t remember the rhythm at all and I try to hum it or anything at all that might help me remember and once I’ve got the first few moments it comes flooding back.

It doesn’t help that I’m relatively new to guitar.

> It doesn’t help that I’m relatively new to guitar.

I've played for 16 years and I still have these moments. But thankfully it's so satisfying when the music finally kicks in.

Same thing! I had played the piece 5 minutes before the lesson and right after the lesson warmup (I warmup before the lesson so that my teacher thinks I'm better than I really am...ego..self denial...whatever) he asks for the piece and I can't play beyond the first bar.

Is there a word or a phrase for this phenomenon? When something becomes a habit requiring no thought at all and then, when forced to actually think about it, the brain draws a complete blank?

Yes, "the centipede effect": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Centipede%27s_Dilemma

What a great poem:

“A centipede was happy – quite!

Until a toad in fun

Said, "Pray, which leg moves after which?"

This raised her doubts to such a pitch,

She fell exhausted in the ditch

Not knowing how to run.“

Check out the Backwards Brain Bicycle. Lots of fun.

https://youtu.be/MFzDaBzBlL0

Isn't it just muscle memory? Like how it is difficult to switch back and forth between a Qwerty keyboard and a Dvorak keyboard, except with the addition of balance thrown in.

This is worth a watch, from Smarter Every Day.

Personally I call this « playing piano », as I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten passed this stage when practicing..

In classical music at least it's often referred to as a "memory lapse"

Your comment got me looking into the phenomenon, and I found this great article: https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1994-07-17-19941981...

From 1994!

Wonderful article, great find!

And I like being reminded of the great pressure many creative spirits feel. It's serious business, managing pressure and also doing your work.

Would love to read if anyone has it mirrored? Looks like the original article isn't available for EU market.

Maybe one of these two will work:

https://outline.com/SeEEHt

https://archive.is/D05nu

For the future, you can usually create these for yourself by going to top of the sites that I linked.

Works great! Also on other sites, thanks for the tip.

Some refer to it as an effect of muscle memory. Something you can do effortlessly, but can't actually describe how to another person.

That and, apologies in advance, the phenomenon of 'manual breathing'.

Emacs!