Imagine sitting in front of the TV watching a contest and a question about something you know appears. You know the answer, but it seems impossible to remember. He feels he knows the answer. After all, what’s going on? Librarian, can’t your memory find it?What is happening is that there has been a blockage in memory recovery: the phenomenon of the tip of the tongue.
In many cases remembering something is an automatic process, retrieving information from memory and in response to a stimulus is the specific part of memory that is very involuntary, what generates difficulties is the attempt to find the internal thoughts that allow us to recover the information.
- The process of retrieving memories is an automatic act.
- A given stimulus results in an automatic response.
- For example.
- Cycling.
- Signing something.
- Or driving a car.
- How to do all this automatically correctly?.
Our memory is not perfect. In fact, it often fails; In addition, we are unable to detect many of the mistakes you make. We talk about forgetfulness, failure or memory disturbances.
An important area of research in this area is what corresponds to the phenomenon of the avant-garde of language, this phenomenon is an example of the existence of something that we know and we cannot recover immediately, one way or another we know where we need to go to look for that memory, and we can even talk about related elements, but we have not been able to recover it.
The phenomenon of the tip of the tongue is an almost universal experience in which a person has difficulty remembering a word or name that he knows well, as we go through the experience of this phenomenon, we feel that we are about to remember the word that has been blocked.
Although we do not remember, we have the feeling that the blocked word is figuratively “at the tip of the tongue”. The inability to access words and the feeling of being about to remember them are two key elements that define the phenomenon of the tip of the tongue.
The phenomenon of the tip of the tongue has been analyzed in detail since the first empirical study of the language in 1966, this study revealed that people were able to remember several things related to the word they had on the tip of the tongue and that they could also identify it as soon as the word was introduced.
Subsequently, the researchers studied what became known as the effect of the ugly sister, which consists in the repeated recovery of erroneous or different words in the process of finding the right word in our memory.
The ugly sisters had a superficial resemblance to the correct word, however, they were used more frequently than the blocked word.
People try all kinds of tricks or methods to “unlock” it, which can be quite frustrating. We have repeatedly analyzed our inner and external world for a solution. In some cases, we even use the alphabet to find the solution. , when we give up, we end up remembering the word without any problem.
Interestingly, it has been observed that the clues or data offered to a person in this situation can have a negative effect, so it takes longer to remember the word that is blocked, in these cases when the person searches his memory for the only thing that or remembers is the clue offered to him.
First of all, the phenomenon of the tip of the tongue is a very common and perhaps universal experience. One researcher analyzed 51 languages and observed that in 45 there were expressions in which the word “language” to describe this phenomenon.
Second, the phenomenon of the tip of the tongue appears very frequently, usually once a week, and the periodicity increases with age.
Third, it is often related to own names. It is common to remember the first letter of the search word. We can remember the things a person likes, their work, and the color of their hair, but we don’t remember that person’s name.
Finally, fortunately, we were able to solve the problem in about 50% of situations, so if you frequently suffer from this symptom, don’t worry!, it’s a very common phenomenon and it’s not associated with any kind of disorder.