Think the pandemic made you forget how to drive and park? Experts explain what's going on

On a Sunday afternoon in early May, Robert Johnson backed out of his garage, preparing to visit his company's office — a place he hasn't driven to regularly since before the coronavirus pandemic. His wife screamed. Johnson slammed on the brakes. There, just behind the vehicle, was his dog.

"I think I forgot how to drive," said Johnson, the founder of a woodworking shop in Stamford, Conn. And his dog — a "fat and long" pug-dachshund mix — is no longer accustomed to cars reversing out of the garage. The experience made Johnson anxious about resuming frequent driving, he says.

Jessica Pellien, a publicist in Yardley, Pa., is struggling similarly with parking. "Every time I park it's slanted," she said. "I'm working on it, but it's been two weeks, and I'm still not back to where I was before the pandemic."
It made us wonder: Can you really forget skills like driving, especially in a relatively short time span? What's going on?

"There's probably some refreshing necessary," said Ronald C. Petersen, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. He noted that memories are stored across a network in the brain, rather than in just one location. "These memory patterns probably haven't been used for six months, eight months or a year. The behaviors that are associated with them have to be reinvigorated and restimulated, but they're still there."
Cognitively, much is required to drive (or bike) safely: high-level thinking, decision-making, risk calculating and responding to hazards, for example. It requires coordination among our sensory, motor and cognitive systems. "That's really complicated," Walshe said. "Your brain is doing a lot that you may not even realize."

While the basic skills involved with driving are likely still intact, tasks that require more attention (like driving at night), more precision (parking) or memories that aren't so easily accessible (where an old haunt is located) may have eroded. That's true "even after a short, strange, time away," said Robert Kraft, a professor of cognitive psychology at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio.