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It's not a question of losing your memory. It's a question of focus. Getting into "the programmer mindset" means you empty your mind of everything else and pull in lots of information around the problem area you're working on. Documentation about function calls, specifics about the problem you're trying to solve, locations of files and bits of code, etc. People who are really good at programming can do this very well, and it helps them visualize the problem area. It's not that you're losing your memory, you're just using it for something else. Humans only have a finite amount of RAM.