I did this too and also momentarily forgot how to tie my shoes! (Forgot the new method, and the old method.) Now I have saved literally minutes of my life on shoe tying.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.