Does your mind ever go blank?

I find that often during the middlegame my mind just freezes/goes blank. I cannot come up with a single move. Especially when the position is symmetrical.

This does not happen in endgames when my mind is generally on fire.

How do I get rid of this?

You don't get rid of anything.  

Improving at Chess is not non-invasive brain surgery ... no matter how much we'd like to think it is.  Our noodle baskets evolved over centuries and prefer to prioritize activities and thoughts that it thinks are worth its time.  If you are drawing a "blank" and find yourself clueless in the middle game, your brain obviously didn't think it important to remember what to do in these poisitions or doesn't even know where to begin!

So if you are trying to force yourself to play positions better, all you can do is repetitively train it and overstimulate it with "data" and hope ... and I do mean hope ... that it starts absorbing and storing it into its long-term memory.

This is why going over tons of instructional annotated games and see what Masters "typically play in these positions + figuring out all the why/what/where questions about these moves" is something almost any strong player has done in the past.

yep, and I just drew an AutoBlank!

shivsky i totally agree with force-feeding with data part. in fact, that is the point of the book 'move first, think later'. i am trying to get a grasp of typical positions and trying to remember them. i also plan to look into annotated games quite soon but i am at too basic a level for that atm.