What Happens In Your Brain When You Can’t Recall A Word

Dr. Cella Wright explains:

Tip-of-the-tongue

“Tip-of-the-tongue” is a temporary retrieval glitch where you feel you know the word but can’t pull it up, even though its meaning and associations are partly accessible.

What’s happening: alongside normal word-retrieval activity, the conflict-detecting anterior cingulate becomes active, generating the familiar sense of frustration and near-recall.

Why it’s happening: while the word retrieval moves from meaning → associations → sound, the “sound” step seems most vulnerable to slipping, making the final step of recall stall. Note that if you’re trying to write it, the process is just the same, except that there’s a four step (spelling) that you also never get to because of not passing the “sound” step

This happens more with some words than others; proper nouns, infrequently used words, and abstract or less-visual terms—like “idiosyncrasy” or “revelation”—are most likely to trigger the state.

Further, related (but incorrect) words can act as blocking distractors, such as remembering “Dorothy” instead of “Judy Garland”, derailing your retrieval pathway.

Fun fact: this is one thing where multilingual people are at a disadvantage, a change from the usual “multilingualism has only benefits except in early years whereby it has the tradeoff of slowing the path to speech”. Multilingual speakers experience more tip-of-the-tongue states, likely because words from one language interfere with retrieval in another, especially during language switching.

Writer’s anecdote: I definitely have this often, with sometimes a word coming to me in a whole bunch of languages, just not the one I need!

You might be wondering about the extent to which this correlates with age, and yes, frequency does increase with age, but this can be for good reasons as well as bad, i.e. while it can potentially be due to cognitive decline in speech-related regions, it can also be a matter of simply knowing more words. And while there is theoretically no known limit to how much information can be stored in the brain, and in fact more items means more connections and therefore often greater ease of access, the fact remains that more connections also means more opportunity to errantly go off-piste.

For more on all of this plus a bonus tip for how to get unstuck, enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

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Take care!