How many times have you been in the middle of a conversation with someone and need to use a word or remember a name that just completely leaves you? You sit there are try and remember it for a few moments, but if it doesn’t …
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This is so cool!
Immediately before I read this, I sent an email to a friend with the name of a person that neither of us could come up with yesterday. It just popped into my head when I was doing something totally unrelated.
For years I’ve made the serious – but apparently humorous to others – comment that I need to clean out the file cabinets of my brain, that they have gotten so cluttered I have trouble retrieving mental files, and I need to make room for incoming information.
Dr. Schacter used the metaphor of file cabinets of the brain, but said it’s more like an untidy desk. He’s never had the opportunity to check out my brain’s file cabinets. (Although my desk might be a better analogy after all. Sometimes it looks like a landfill.)
I’ll have the right word on the tip of my tongue when I want to tell friends I’ve been right all along. (V … v … validated. That’s it! Validated!)
Great article!
Thank you! This phenomenon has been worrying me as I pass the traditional retirement age. I can’t get to vocabulary that I know.
Previous to this I, like the previous commentator, had been using a model of information storage/retrieval to explain why I can’t commit new stuff to memory as fast as younger colleagues. I use the idea of remote storage and front-end storage.
But very grateful to know that the word retrieval phenomenon is just a “normal” aging thing!
So does anyone know why the tip of the tongue experience often happens to two people at the same time? For example, I often find that I know the name of someone, say an actor, but when my someone asks me the name because they’ve momentarily forgotten it, I can’t remember it either even though it’s ‘on the tip of my tongue’. I find this happens a lot and it seems an odd coincidence!
I just call it “mental-pause.” :>)
Peace!
Mine has gotten so severe I can barely remember any complex words. I am only 20, why is this happening to me?