What to Do When Your Mind Goes Blank
By Dara Halloran · Under Pressure
What should you do when your mind goes blank? Breathe out and do not announce it: the gap looks far shorter to the room than it feels. Repeat your last sentence slowly, as if for emphasis, because it is the strongest cue for what comes next. If nothing comes, ask the audience a question or skip to the next point you remember, and bring the missing one in later.
You are mid-sentence and the next part is simply gone. Absent, which is worse than hard to recall. Meanwhile the room is looking at you and the silence is getting louder.
Almost every experienced speaker has had this. It is worth knowing what is happening, because understanding it removes much of its power.
What is happening in your head
The part of the brain most involved in holding your next few sentences ready is the prefrontal cortex, which supports working memory: the small, temporary store you use to keep a plan in mind while you carry it out. Amy Arnsten's 2009 review of the neuroscience describes how acute stress, through a surge of stress chemicals, can rapidly weaken prefrontal function while strengthening older, more reflexive responses.1 That is a sensible design for running away from danger and a poor one for finishing a sentence about quarterly targets.
Add the recursive part, where noticing the blank produces more stress, and you get a short spiral. The blank causes alarm, the alarm deepens the blank.
Two things matter about this:
- It is usually temporary. It tends to resolve within seconds once the spiral stops.
- It is much less visible than it feels. A three-second gap feels catastrophic from inside. From the audience it usually reads as a pause, and pauses can read as deliberate.
The second point has been measured. Kenneth Savitsky and Thomas Gilovich found that people giving a speech overestimate how nervous they look to the people watching, and that telling speakers about this gap made their speeches better, in their own eyes and in the eyes of observers.2 Much of the damage from going blank comes from the panicked recovery rather than the blank itself.
The three moves
1. Repeat your last sentence.
Slowly, with slight emphasis, as though for effect. "So the thing that changed... the thing that changed was the timing."
This is often the best move, and memory research suggests why. Endel Tulving and Donald Thomson's principle of encoding specificity holds that a cue helps you recall something when it was part of how that thing was stored in the first place.3 When you rehearsed the talk, each sentence was laid down right after the one before it. Your own last sentence is therefore one of the strongest cues available for what follows it. Saying it again puts you back on the path you rehearsed, and from the outside it is hard to tell apart from emphasis.
2. Go to the audience.
"Let me check I have not lost anyone. Where are we, is the second point landing?" Or simply take a question early.
This buys ten or twenty seconds of not-speaking, which is often all the reset needs, and it does not look like a rescue. It looks like a speaker who is comfortable enough to interrupt themselves.
3. Skip and continue.
If it does not come back, go to the next thing you do remember. The audience has no script. They do not know what was skipped. A talk missing one section is a fine talk; a talk where the speaker visibly hunts for a missing section for ninety seconds is not. If the missing point comes back later, you can bring it in then: "One thing I want to add to the earlier point."
Do not announce it. "Sorry, I have completely lost my place" converts an invisible problem into a visible one.
The recovery script
Whatever you do, do not narrate the blank. "Sorry, I have gone blank, give me a second, sorry" is usually worse than a few seconds of silence, because it tells the room something is wrong and asks them to be uncomfortable with you.
If you must say anything: "Let me take that again." Four words, no apology, entirely normal-sounding. Then take it again.
Breathe out before you restart. A slow exhale is something you can do on purpose while the next sentence is still missing, and it stops you starting again in a rush.
Reducing the odds
Know your structure, not your script. Word-for-word memorisation is brittle: lose one word and the chain breaks, because every word is the cue for the next. Knowing the shape means any gap is recoverable, because you know where you were going even if not exactly how.
Have a landmark per section. One physical prop, one number, one name. Concrete landmarks are easier to keep hold of under stress than long sentences, and each one is a cue for a whole section.
Over-rehearse the transitions. The joins between sections are the weakest links in a talk, because nothing in the content of one section necessarily cues the next. Rehearse the last line of each section into the first line of the next as a single unit, so the join becomes a cue of its own.
Have water. Reaching for a glass is a socially invisible few seconds. It is one of the cheapest resets available, which is why so many experienced speakers keep one nearby.
Practise with pressure in it. Rehearsing alone in a calm room does not train recovery, because alone you simply stop and restart. Rehearsing in front of even one or two people gives you a reason to keep going, which is the skill you need. The case for that is in the case for speaking badly in public.
Afterwards
When it is over, write down where the blank happened. Check whether it was at a transition, at a number, or at a point you were less sure of than the rest. Each of those has a specific fix: rehearse the join, write the number on a card, or decide what you actually think. A blank is unpleasant, but it is also a precise report on which part of the talk was holding the least weight.
References
- Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2648
- Savitsky, K., & Gilovich, T. (2003). The illusion of transparency and the alleviation of speech anxiety. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39(6), 618–625. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-1031(03)00056-8
- Tulving, E., & Thomson, D. M. (1973). Encoding specificity and retrieval processes in episodic memory. Psychological Review, 80(5), 352–373. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0020071