Why Does Writing Make Malcolm Gladwell Get Lost?

Malcolm Gladwell gets lost when he stands up from deep writing because he uses the same part of his brain for writing that he uses to make sense of direction. He very often does not know where he is once he goes outside. It takes him like two minutes before he realizes where he is.

Knowing where you are going means visualizing a series of steps, and writing exhausts that module, so he cannot do it again right away, even in a more trivial way. Very little of his life is given over to writing, much less than he would have thought. Most of his days are spent reporting or arranging to report, and logistics consume an enormous amount of the background work. Writing is not rare, but it is relatively rare. In the middle of a writing stretch, it takes a couple of days, and by day three the piece starts to make sense again once he has used that muscle again.

He has never written every day the way some fiction writers do. The exception was his time as a newspaper writer, which he treats as a different kind of writing.