A hort while ago I decided that I was ON enough to make it to the kitchen to forage. It was a calculated risk, but I was quite hungry. I made it to the kitchen and popped open a can of fruit chunks, stuck a fork full in my face, and turned to head back to my chair.
Sure enough, holding the can of fruit was too much t process, or so it seemed. I steeled myself for the struggle, but thought that I would have another stab of fruit. As I fished around looking into the can, my "struggle" gear was momentarily in neutral as I focused on the intricacies of fruit cocktail at 4:00 AM. And I took an effortless step.
For just a moment I was distracted and the freeze broke long enough to take that step and then closed back in. I was able to reproduce it three or four times before the lab supplies ran out.
I had felt that one reason for freezing was too much stimulus coming in. The rabbit in the headlights. But this added to how we can lose ourselves in a task or music or a joint makes it seem less that than it seems a matter of too much focus on what is happening in the complex world of balance and walking. A sort of hypervigilance monitoring each muscle the way many of us monitor the world?