Why you know the answer but freeze in technical interviews

I froze on a CSS flexbox question once. The interviewer asked me "what does flex: 1 do?" — and I went blank. Flexbox. Something I'd used literally hundreds of times in production. I knew it, obviously, but in that moment my brain just... stopped. I started throwing out different possible answers in a super chaotic way, jumping between explanations, trying to say anything that would confirm I'm good enough for this position. After that part of the interview they told me they don't want to move forward. The thing is — I knew flexbox. I'd shipped production layouts with it. But under pressure, that knowledge was locked somewhere I couldn't reach. This isn't a knowledge problem. It's a performance problem. And the fix isn't more studying. Your brain literally works differently under pressure I'm not going to pretend I'm a neuroscience expert here, but there's a simple way to understand what happens when you freeze. When you're in a stressful situation (and yes, someone evaluating your tech