You’re sure you know your third grade teacher’s name— it’s like you’re hovering over it in your mind, but it just won’t materialize. Researchers call this tantalizing torment a “tip-of-the-tongue state,” and it's something everyone experiences. But what's actually happening when a word gets caught here?
And how can you best get it unstuck? Most of the time, our brains seamlessly summon words from vast stores of knowledge, paring their meaning and sounds, and stringing them into sentences. But in a tip-of-the-tongue moment, this retrieval process derails, and there's the sensation of remembering the word but the struggle to recall it.
In these moments, on top of the usual brain activity associated with word retrieval, we also see other brain regions light up, like the conflict-detecting anterior cingulate, which generates that urgently frustrating feeling. It's unclear whether the target word is directly detected and just not successfully recalled, or associations are simply helping the brain infer that it has the word. The reality could also be some combination of these hypotheses.
But the experience is pretty consistent with how psycholinguistic theorists think we mentally organize language-related information, going from the word's meaning and associations to how it sounds. Some researchers think that the last layer of information— sound— might be the most vulnerable to glitches. Lots of things seem to influence how likely you are to enter a tip-of-the-tongue state, all the way from what kinds of words are involved, to your experiences and environment.
For example, tip-of-the-tongue states occur most frequently with proper nouns, infrequently used words, and ones that are more abstract and less visual, like “idiosyncrasy” or “revelation. ” Cognitively, recognizing a face and associating it with general information, like someone’s profession, is often easy, while names tend to trip us up. And retrieval of unintended words is also a common problem.
Like if you’re trying to summon the star of “The Wizard of Oz’s” name and keep getting stuck on Dorothy instead of Judy Garland. In these situations, the words seem to work as distracting, red herring-like blockers in the retrieval pathway. And one study found that stressful test conditions made participants report more tip-of-the-tongue experiences, suggesting that environmental conditions, including stress, can exacerbate them.
But some people tend to have more tip-of-the-tongue moments than others. This seems to be true for people who speak multiple languages— perhaps because they know more than one word to describe the same thing. So a word in one language might become an interfering blocker for the target word in another.
This seems to be especially true when someone’s switching between languages— but it might also depend on their fluency: one study suggested that people who learned their second language before age five had fewer tip-of-the-tongue stumbles. And sometimes even just hearing a language participants didn’t know has proven to be enough to increase their tip-of-the-tongue incidents. They also seem to rise with age, perhaps from a cognitive decline in speech-related brain areas, greater accumulation of knowledge to search through, or a combination of both.
But while tip-of-the-tongue states may feel like the brain is failing, they seem to have a positive function. Words don't usually go past the point of no return and get permanently forgotten so much as they tend to get tougher to access. That tough-to-shake, tip-of-the-tongue feeling of impending success just around the corner may help motivate us and make us more likely to remember.
And researchers have observed that participants in tip-of-the-tongue states are more likely to spend more time and effort searching for answers. One method for getting something off the tip of your tongue is cueing. This means leaning into the clues your brain surfaces, like associated memories and letters.
For example, if you're trying to remember the name of the ancient city with the legendary Hanging Gardens, you might recall they’re one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and run through the alphabet to see if any letters stand out. Because tip-of-the-tongue moments don’t seem to be just your brain babbling, but perhaps trying to jog its own extensive memory, where your third grade teacher’s name is surely stored. .
. somewhere.
