It may not be because you have a bad memory, but there are simple tricks to prevent this annoyingly short memory loss.
Have you ever had trouble remembering someone’s name? Maybe you can even see the person’s face in your mind’s eye, and if a friend gives you a hint that it’s someone, you remember it immediately.
Although it often happens with people’s names, it can actually happen with any word. It’s not that you can’t remember the word’s meaning, it’s that you can’t find the linguistic label for it.
You have the meaning of that word in your mind, but you just can’t say the word, which is a common trouble that plagues almost all middle-aged and older people with cognitive problems. Even with the most familiar words and names of acquaintances, memory failure can occur without warning.
The most troublesome words, the researchers found, were proper nouns and the names of objects. This sudden short circuit of memory can last for seconds, minutes or even hours, which is annoying. In fact, when asked what troubles people have in old age, the elderly often mention that they will not be able to recall the word they are going to say for a while.
In this case, he/she knows exactly which word he/she is going to say. It seems that the word that has slipped out of her mouth is on the tip of her tongue, but for some reason it is hard to say it, at least at that moment.
Psychologists call this phenomenon the “tip-of-the-tongue” (tip-of-the-tongue). But is this phenomenon really as it seems, a precursor to confusion?
For psychologists studying the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, trying to understand how and why this phenomenon occurs is a small but no small challenge. Just as astronomers study transient astronomical phenomena such as supernovae, researchers know that tongue-in-cheek phenomena will eventually occur, but do not know exactly when. Because of this uncertainty, researchers have taken two very different approaches to the study. One was to study natural data, and the other was an experimental approach, in which participants were induced to produce the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon by experimental means and were studied.
In particular, they attempted to quantify two aspects of this phenomenon: the frequency of the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, and the probability of overcoming it. Overcoming means that the word that one wants to say but cannot, without external help (e.g., looking it up or being prompted by a friend) is finally successfully thought of by oneself.
Participants in the study recorded each occurrence of the tongue twister, and researchers studied their records to assess the frequency and probability of overcoming the tongue twister. The results of the study showed that college students experienced tongue-tiedness about once or twice a week, while the rate was slightly higher among those in their 60s and early 70s. In contrast, the frequency of occurrence was almost twice as high among study participants in their 80s as among college students. Diary studies of participants suggest that tongue-in-cheek phenomena can be overcome, and the typical success rate for such studies can exceed 90%.
However, we need to take these natural data with a grain of salt when interpreting them. Because older adults who are more worried about their instantaneous memory loss may be more attentive to noting their tongue-in-cheek phenomenon responses, the probability would be high. And the elderly, perhaps because their lives are not as busy as those of younger people, may be more careful to record tongue phenomena that occur to them. It is also possible that participants recorded more experiences in which they were able to overcome the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon and fewer cases in which they failed to do so.
Another research method is to experimentally induce participants to develop the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. This method was invented by Harvard psychologists Roger Brown and David McNeil.
They found that by providing participants with only the dictionary definition of an uncommon English word, usually the participants would fail to say the word. The definition of one of the English words used in their study was, “a maritime navigation instrument used to measure angular distances between objects, especially the height of the sun, moon, and stars. “
(If this example leads to a tongue-in-cheek phenomenon, then the word you are searching for is sextant, or “sextant.”)
In this study, participants were often able to say the word they wanted without difficulty. In other cases, the participants did not know what word the definition described. However, if they found themselves in a tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon state, Brown and McNeil asked more questions. The researchers found that despite being in the tip-of-the-tongue state, participants could still correctly answer some of the information about the word, even if they could not grasp the word itself.
For example, when participants were asked to guess how many syllables the word had, or what its initial letter was, they performed well beyond the probability of guessing. Not surprisingly, even if the participant said the wrong word, the word usually had a similar meaning to the correct answer. When given the definition of “sextant,” participants sometimes responded with “astrolabe” or “compass “. However, they also sometimes provided words that sounded similar to the correct word. “sextant” (sextant) where the meaning of sextant would lead participants to take “sextent” (sexton) and “church minister ” (sexton) to respond.
If we conceive of sailors who use sextants as neither musical sextants nor church ushers, then there would be such erroneous speculation suggesting that some factor affects the perception of words in our memory.
However, studies of older adults suggest that some information, such as the initials of words, is not as easy to guess for older adults.
As with many issues in cognitive aging, we can think of the increase in tongue-in-cheek phenomenon as a matter of seeing whether the glass is half-empty or half-full, i.e., it can be viewed from both a pros and cons perspective. On the one hand, the momentary inability to recall the word to be said can be seen as evidence that the connection between the word and its meaning is weakened by the passage of years and the passage of time in memory. However, the increased frequency of tongue-in-cheek phenomena as we age may also reflect something else quite different.
According to Donna Dahlgren, a psychologist at Indiana University Southeast, the key point is not age, but knowledge. If older people have more information stored in their long-term memory, then they will have more incidents of momentary forgetfulness.
The tongue-in-cheek phenomenon may also have its place, and can be a signal to the elderly that this momentary word they can’t say is actually something they know, even if they can’t think of it now.
This reflection on memory capacity is beneficial because it suggests that by spending more time looking for the word you want to express, you will eventually succeed in finding it.
In this way, the tongue-in-cheek phenomenon may represent not a memory loss but a valuable source of information. If you’re old enough to still worry that you often can’t think of a word, rest assured that psychologists’ research shows that if you do regular aerobic exercise, tongue-tiedness may occur less often.
So the next time you’re struggling to think of the word you want, don’t stay in your room, go out and wander around the neighborhood, and the word will pop into your head.
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