The Science Behind Why A Word Gets Stuck On The Tip Of Your Tongue

When you know a word, but it just does not come out of your mouth, even though it is there in your head and you can remember the third-grade teacher's name, it's there, but it doesn't come out. It has a name in cognitive science: a "tip-of-the-tongue" state. It's something that happens to nearly everyone, and researchers have been studying the specifics of what happens when in the brain.

What Normally Happens When You Retrieve A Word

Typically, recalling words is a smooth process. The brain accesses a large repository of knowledge, correlates meaning with sound and links words into sentences without deliberate effort. When this retrieval process fails halfway, a strong feeling they know the word but cannot retrieve it, it's known as a "tip-of-the-tongue" moment.

What's Actually Happening In The Brain

While in a tip-of-the-tongue state, parts of the brain that normally control word retrieval are active, and other areas are activated, too, such as the anterior cingulate cortex, an area that is involved in detecting conflict. This is probably what gives rise to the particular complaint that is associated with it. It remains unclear whether the brain has located the target word and the word just cannot be fully recalled, or whether the brain is using the context in which the word is embedded to reconstruct its presence in memory. The actual cause could be a combination of both processes.

This is the way that psycholinguists think language information is stored in the brain, beginning with the meaning of a word or its associations and then proceeding down to its pronunciation. The final sound that is thought to be the most fragile, and where recall may go wrong, is the sound of the word itself, which may be what makes the meaning seem like it is right in front of you, but the word itself is just out of reach.

The brain does plenty of other odd things, covered in Weird Human Body And Mind Facts Backed By Real Science.

Which Words Get Stuck Most Often

Some words are much more apt to invoke a TOT than other words. Abstract, concrete words that don't readily form a visual picture, uncommon words such as idiosyncrasy or revelation, are more likely to get stuck than frequently used words. This is related to another pattern in memory: The ability to remember a person's face and remember general facts about that person like their occupation is usually much easier than remembering their actual name.

One similar and frequent issue is pulling the incorrect word out altogether. The word 'Dorothy' may keep coming up in the mind of the reader, instead of the correct answer, which is Judy Garland, the actress who portrayed Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. In these instances, the wrong word acts almost like a blocker blocking the retrieval pathway, actively blocking access to the correct word.

Stress and Environment Make It Worse

The environment is a factor that can measurably affect the occurrence of tip-of-the-tongue states. In one study, people indicated they experienced many more of these moments during the stressful test condition as compared to the less stressful condition, which implies that stress does not only make recall feel more difficult; it might actually make it more difficult as well.

Why Some People Experience This More Than Others

Multilingual individuals are more prone to tip-of-the-tongue phenomena than are monolingual individuals. This could be because a greater number of words for the same concept in different languages provides more opportunity for interference effects, whereby a word in one language prevents recall of the word in the other language. This effect seems strongest when the other language is actively switched on or off in people's minds, and it also seems to depend on the level of fluency in the second language: one study revealed that individuals with a second language acquired before the age of five showed less tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon than those who learned it later in life. So, it turns out that merely hearing a foreign language, even passively, has been found to lead to a rise in the frequency of these word retrieval errors shortly afterwards.

The second is age, as the incidence of tip-of-the-tongue increases with age. This could be a combination of the changes occurring over time within speech-related areas of the brain, and it could also be that they have had to search through a larger amount of words over time, which makes the actual retrieval process more complex over time.

Why This Might Actually Be Useful

When you have a tip of the tongue, it's not usually a sign that the word has been forgotten for good. Usually, during these periods, words aren't lost forever, but rather they are just temporarily inaccessible. The itching sensation that it is "just around the corner" may be a good thing because it encourages more searching for the correct answer. Studies have shown that when someone is stumped on a word, they tend to work harder and spend more time to find it than if they don't know the word at all, which implies that the brain believes this is a solvable problem, rather than a roadblock.

A Practical Way To Get Unstuck

The technique of 'cueing', in which the person who is stuck deliberately focuses on any partial clues that the brain has already raised, related memories, category associations, or even individual letters that feel associated with the word, has been documented as a way to break a 'tip-of-the-tongue'. For example, if someone is trying to remember the name of the ancient city which was famous for its Hanging Gardens, they may first remember that it is one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and then work through the alphabet in their mind to see if anything rings a bell. This approach works because this tip-of-the-tongue state is not a random static in the brain but is a search process carried out in a very large memory system that contains the target word but can't quite reach it.