This is What Happens to Your Brain When You Go Blank Mid-Speech

On a Monday morning, you are heading to office for a weekly meeting. While driving, a million thoughts are crossing your mind and you have made crucial pointers in your head. Great! You remember every crucial thing you want to talk about with your team.

So you settle down and begin speaking. Everything's going just fine. You have mentioned two points with a couple of interruptions and discussions in between. Going on to the third point, you begin - "We also need to do......................." (Pause). And you go blank! "What was I going to say" - You ask your team, but they are clueless because they obviously don't know.
Well, if you tend to go blank while speaking during meetings or even while chatting with your friends on a casual day out, this is what may be happening to you.

"It’s because of a concept called Dissociation - a mental process of disconnecting from one’s thoughts, feelings, memories or sense of identity," says Dr Vipul, a Behavioural Neurology specialist and Psychiatrist with Medanta hospital.

This concept works just like a computer. "Your laptop hangs or crashes if it has too many things to do, the same way your brain also shuts down for a minute to calm down when there are countless things going on inside," he explains.

To understand it better, relate it to this - Remember how in the late 80s or 90 Bollywood movies, when bad news came, somebody’s voice would go or someone would be paralysed? Similarly, when stress of any sort takes over, you suddenly go silent because you tend to forget what you were going to say next.

Dr Vipul says this problem occurs in people who are under tremendous stress and trying to multitask. Moreover, during meetings and discussions particularly, it takes longer to get back to the original point you were talking about when there are interruptions. You lose your chain of thought, so you tend to forget more often.

"As a part of the defense mechanism, the brain shuts down for a few seconds or a minute. It wakes up again once the stress goes down to a certain manageable level. In simple words, the brain and heart are not in sync for some time," says Dr Vipul.

He further explains that stress are of different types. The basic understanding of what stress could be, it's anything that does not allow you to give your 100% in your job or personal life. It could range from personal stress (family-related problems), societal, financial, health or professional. The more these stressors, the more there are chances of experiencing this problem where you tend to forget things that you remembered clearly just a minute ago.

Therefore, work on throwing the stressors out of your life and often making a note of the things that you may want to speak about really helps. So carry a diary where you have all the points listed down and you won't find yourself in such a situation again.

(Image credits: www.carajoyner.com)