What is going on here? One ‘feels’ that the particular piece of information is about to be recalled but obviously it has not arrived otherwise one would say it.
What exactly are we feeling? Do neurons have nerves that ‘feel’ when info passes through them?
And recalled from where? And arrived where?
I’ve heard there’s a sort of preparation area that thoughts get copied into before we say them, and in this case the thought gets moved there but then something goes wrong, so we know it’s supposed to be ready to say, but it isn’t.
No idea where I heard this and don’t know if it’s true!
There is actually a lot of research and interest on this TOT (tip of the tongue) phenomenon, as evidenced by the Wikipedia entry. The Stuff To Blow Your Mind podcast had a good episode on this topic recently.
The past two years I have been dealing with this more and more when I write and even post on here. The word usually hits me after 15 or 20 min but too late to be of use. I am 67 now. I expect it will be getting worse with time. If it helps as a clue it is usually a word I seldom use in daily conversation but will commonly see it in things I read.
Happens to me from time to time also, when I am trying to write a post here. My solution: I usually know at least in general what I’m trying to write, enough to google something-or-other about the topic. Looking through the cites that google fishes up, I can very often spot exactly the word I’m looking for. Sometimes I can think of a kinda-sorta-synonym for the word I’m looking for, and google that to find the exact word.
It’s not always just a word - sometimes it’s an entire idea, fact or event memory. What seems be be happening (in my subjective experience of the phenomenon) is not that the object itself is hard to recall, but that some link or trigger to it is not functioning - almost like the information itself is on an index card, but the protruding tab (which is not the information itself - just a way of finding it) is missing or otherwise invisible.
I’ve experienced cases where I could remember exactly where I was doing - for example eactly where I was walking - when I had a particular idea, but could not recall the idea itself. In these cases, revisiting the place triggered the memory. I guess my brain just used the wrong thing to index the thought.
If you imagine trying to recall a line from a song, there might be two stages to this recall; first you remember the song melody, then you follow one verse or chorus to the line in question.
So tip of the tongue might represent that first stage, where you recall some associative link and you’re just following it through.
Although…I also think there can be more than one explanation for this kind of phenomenon.
For example, sometimes I can’t recall a word, and the reason I can’t is because another, similar-sounding and usually more common word, is right there at the front of my consciousness.
For example I want to say “reprise” but for some reason all I can think is “represent”. This would cause a similar “tip-of-the-tongue” feeling, but from a different cause.
This part of the TOT experience is what feels the most eerie to me, actually. It’s like my mind is working on the problem in the background, without me being consciously involved, and then later it’ll deliver up the answer. It’s a creepy notion to me that my mind can go off and do something in the back room without me, as it were. Who knows what else it’s getting up to back there?
I had a bad case of this just a couple of days ago. For whatever reason, I was thinking about a guy that I was friends with years ago, and I was trying to remember the name of one of his ex-girlfriends. It was right on the tip of my tongue. I could kind of see the shape of the name. I knew it had three or four syllables. I knew it was kind of French-sounding. I could think of a bunch of names that sounded almost like it. Pamela? Amelie? No, not quite right. The actual name was just out of reach.
So, anyway, I went to do something else, and forgot about it. A couple of hours later, I was sitting at my desk, not thinking about this at all, and suddenly, out of nowhere, it was just sitting in my mind: Oh, right, it’s Madeleine.
I mean, thanks, brain. Good job, and much appreciated. But I wish you would involve me when you go rummaging around back there for answers. It’s weird for you to be doing it unsupervised like that.
Huh, guess you’re not much in favor of “consulting it with the pillow” or any other of those techniques which amount to “putting the problem in the back burner and letting your subconscious work on it”.
Me, I discovered a long time ago that my subconscious is smarter than me. Quite a jerk too: bitch has been known to wake me up at 3am to hand over the idea she was working on. I’m also the kind of person whose first impulse is most likely to be the right one.
I guess I should be in favor of it. I mean, it works. And I know perfectly well that a ton of my mental processing is subconscious, so I should just embrace it. It just feels spooky to me when it’s so noticeable. Also, I know that there’s a lot of weird stuff in that back room, so I’m not completely comfortable with my mind hanging out there by itself. It feels a bit like letting the grandchildren play unsupervised in the basement where I buried the dead hookers. (I mean, metaphorically. I don’t have actual grandchildren, or an actual history of burying dead hookers. But… oh, you know what I mean.)
There’s a very good point made towards the end of that episode: When you’re in a TOT state, don’t stay there, even if you feel that you’ll be able to retrieve the information. Just look up the answer right away, or at least walk away and don’t think about it. Otherwise, you’ll just keep going down the wrong pathways in your mind, reinforcing them, and making it more likely that you’ll have another TOT over the same piece of information later.
I have a stupid tendency to mess this up for myself whenever I’m teaching myself something. Like when I was memorizing the names of all the Roman emperors (yes, I know, don’t ask why). Some of them are pretty obscure, and I don’t always have much context for them. So, I’ll get TOTs when trying to remember their names. My stubborn pride then tells me that I *should *remember, so I’ll keep trying, instead of just looking up the answer. The problem is that straining to recall a name just leads me to thinking of a bunch of wrong names, and the next time, those wrong names come to mind even more readily, instead of the right one. It just makes everything worse. A couple of emperors are basically guaranteed TOTs for me by now.
Actually, I probably did this just now with the name of the girl I mentioned earlier. If I ever have another occasion to recall her name in the future, I’ll probably have the same problem again, only worse. I was trying too hard to resolve the TOT, and reinforced the wrong names “Pamela” and “Amelie” too much. Now I’ve associated this person with all kinds of useless secondary information. I’ll be thinking of someone else I know called Pamela. I’ll be thinking of the movie Amelie. Meanwhile, “Madeleine”, the correct answer, is getting no reinforcement at all.
So, yeah. Don’t do that.
The best explanation I can give (which I am totally making up based on my primitive understanding of memory) is that memories are stored as neural pathways, which may or may not connect to the neural pathways that are active in the most straightforward fashion. The pathways that were used when it formed were degraded, and you have to somehow find the right path there without knowing where to go. As you try to find the right pathway that leads to the memory, you may pass through areas that you know are close, but there still might not be a direct path to where you are going again based on where you are. Knowing what neighborhood you’re in and searching Google or using a thesaurus or whatever usually will allow you to recognize what you’re looking for by presenting the problem from the opposite direction, and the pathways will link up again.
If you really want to fuck with your brain you should try and tie the names you are searching for to the TOT frustration you feel. Reinforcing the TOT will reinforce the name. Every time you get frustrated you’ll shout “Galba, Gordian, Balabanus”
Did you mean to write on the tip of my tongue or is there some British/American difference in usage here?
There is one particular colleague I have whose name I sometimes forget. I know exactly who he is when I see him. It’s just the name that my brain won’t retrieve. There are other people whom I’ve know for shorter periods of time and less well for whom this is not a problem at all. Brains are funny.
We don’t even know what actually happens when we recall something. Once we’ve a decent understanding of that, and science isn’t even close at the moment, we’ll get right on to “tip of the tongue”.
But on a more abstract and known level, information in the brain is connected in multiple ways and you’ll have reason to know that this is a piece of information you actually possess. For instance you might remember having seen an actor many times before, and having used her name, even if you can’t produce the name right there and then. The feeling that it’s about to be recalled any moment now is just related to how certain you are that it’s in there, not some sort of perception that it’s actually on its way.
Does this ever happen to anyone else: You’re sitting watching TV with a friend and an actor appears on screen and you turn to your friend and say “Who is that? We’ve seen him before, right?” “Yeah, I know what you mean, but I can’t think of where.”
So you let it go. Several hours later in a completely different context it suddenly pops into your head that the actor played the dogcatcher in a series from ten years ago and you yell out “dogcatcher!” (nothing more). And your friend instantly knows what you mean, slaps their forehead and yells “that’s right!” And anyone else who is in the room at the time looks at the two of you and goes “WTF?”
It’s almost like deep in the background your brain was circling around the answer and just needed a little push in the right direction to make it all come to the forefront.
It seems almost related to when you say to someone “Remember the guy from the place who did the thing?” and they know what you’re talking about.
When I can’t find that name or piece of information that I know is in my brain but temporarily unreachable, I say that my internal Rolodex is jammed or not flipping right. Yeah, I’m an old fogey who has actually used a Rolodex to store contact information. And you kids get off my lawn! 
Related phenomenon:
When I was younger, playing guitar more than bass and accompanying myself singing, there was a period of time where I probably knew 200+ songs. I started attending open-mic nights at a local bar, and quickly discovered that I needed to come prepared with a list of song titles to choose from. These were all songs that I could sing and play from memory, but … without a list of titles to refer to, I’d find myself standing at the mic going, “Ummm … what should I sing next?” because despite knowing all those songs, I couldn’t think of a damned one.
Yeah, I have only heard “on the tip of my tongue”. Never “in”.