The other day I was doing a crossword puzzle which, unfortunately, had a sports theme. As I don’t follow any professional sport, this put me at a great disadvantage. One of the non-sports clues was “beginner or amateur.” It was a four letter word, second letter Y, and all the cross clues were sports figures or terms (“Yankees shortstop who hit World Series winning home run in 2006,” things like that) which were of absolutely no use to me. (Yes, I realize that I could have used Google, Wikipedi, my online OED, etc, but by my standards that’s cheating; I only do it when I’ve given up hope and am just amassing info for future puzzles.)
As soon as I saw the “beginner” clue, I knew the answer was someplace in my brain. I knew I’d heard the word, read the word, written the word; I could even recall using it on the Dope and having to give the definition a few posts later. But I couldn’t access the memory for whatever reason. So I put the matter aside, did something else, and a few hours later, “tyro” popped into my mind unbidden.
I’m sure this isn’t an uncommon occurrence. I know how to handle the problem when it occurs. Sometimes just beginning to type a Google query is enough to jog my memory, and my middle-aged brain comes up with the answer before I hit “enter.” At other times, I just do something else and, as on Sunday, the answer comes to me when I am no longer consciously thinking about it. What I’m wondering, though, is what is happening in my brain when I am having this tip-of-the-tongue syndrome. Anybody know?
What is happening in your brain to cause it? No. Nobody knows. If they say they do, they are bullshitting you. We do not even begin to understand the neuroscience of memory well enough to answer a question like that.
The “tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon” is scientifically recognized, however, and there are theories (not really facts) about what is going on at the cognitive level. Here is the Wikipedia entry on it (take with the usual inch of salt).
Yes, given that we know very little as to how memory works, there’s no actual answer for this. However you can generate some quite plausible theories based on general information technology principles.
Generally, repetition is pretty important in generating and maintaining neural pathways. So if you use something frequently, you’re more likely to remember it and access it quickly. Real life analogy: Where’s your wallet? Now where’s your high school diploma? Chances are that you know exactly where your wallet is and you have a vague notion of where your diploma is (“well, last I saw it, it was in some boxes up in the spare room – it’ll take a while to find it.”)
First, the WIKI is wrong, they really DON’T happen more often as you get older - you just are primed to remember them more often because you start stressing over age-related memory loss issues. I remember that study, because I printed it out and gave it to my mother to make her stop stressing over it. I’ll try to find it again, but I have homework due tonight, so it’s not my first priority.
They DO happen more often in areas you don’t think about much. That includes random trivia, things that you do so often that you don’t think about them consciously, and things that are very similar (in sound, spelling, or concept) to things that you DO think about more often, but aren’t actually what you’re trying to retrieve.
The most common conjectures I see in the literature I run across (which consists of interesting or freaky or contradictory studies forwarded to me from several medical relatives and friends) is that it’s either primarily a “retrieval error” or a “filing error.” The first means that something in the memory *access *process has gone temporary wonky, the second means that something in the memory *storage *process has done likewise. For all we know, it could be both, or something entirely different. Thought processes, even abnormal ones, are very poorly understood on a physical level, and studies come out pretty consistently that contradict or expand older ideas in ways we weren’t expecting.
First I would like to see the study that says this doesn’t happen more often as we grow older. It happens to me all the time and didn’t use to. Often I wake up in the middle of the night with the word coming to me. Incidentally, inability to find a word is “anomia”. Which my spell checker rejects. I assume the word in question was “tyro”.
I do not think anomia is quite the same thing as the tip of the tongue (TOT) phenomenon. Anomia usually refers to a chronic inability to recall names of things, due to brain damage, a form of aphasia. The TOT phenomenon is occasional, temporary (usually we think of the word after a bit, often when we have stopped trying too hard), and not pathological. Whether or not it gets more common with age, it certainly does happen to young people.
A potential cause I have heard for it is that multiple things are competing to get into your consciousness at the same time (I don’t know the neurology of it, but that was the explanation). If you let your mind go blank or focus on something else supposedly that will help the answer come to mind since you won’t have multiple things coming forward.
As I said in my original post, there are a whole bunch of competing theories at the cognitive level, and the main ones are outlined in in the Wikipedia link I gave. Nobody knows or even thinks they know the neurology of it.