Tip of the Tongue - Lost but not forgotten
A lot of the examples we have looked at show that even if you think you have forgotten something, it probably is still there. You might not be able to recall it but you might be able to recognise it. And if you can recognise it you can often relearn it faster than you did the first time.
Tip of the Tongue
We have all been there. You get asked a question like “Who is the leader singer of that band?”. You know it but you can’t seem to get it out. It is on the ‘tip of your tongue’.
Nowadays, we just google it instead! The end of the tip of the tongue?But it is still an interesting phenomenon.
Psychologists have been studying this since the 1960s. But how do you that?
One way was to read people words they didn’t use much. Like sextant.
The people were asked to say what it was. If they couldn’t, they were asked to say everything they could about the word. *25
We learned many things from examining the tip of the tongue phenomenon.
Memory is not all or none. Even if we think we have forgotten something there is often something left. Ever forget something but overnight remember it? This is an example of this. In fact, I have started counting of this. If I cannot remember something I just reassure myself that it will come to me later.
Memories aren’t like picture. You can slowly reconstruct them. While sometimes it may seem that it would be easier if memory was like a picture, the fact that we can slowly reconstruct them is very useful. We may not remember something but with careful question, our brain can slowly piece together a memory.
Words may be stored in many ways. In sounds, in pictures and in meanings.
Have you noticed how some people see words as letters and are very good at things like the 9 letter puzzle or Scrabble.
Meanwhile some others seem to remember in meanings and recall the gist of things rather than the specific words.
Some information is easily recalled while other information needs prompting and can be recognised. For any one who has studied for an exam, this needs no further explanation. Prompting is often required to help us to recall information that we think is lost but is still in there.
By why do we remember somethings and not others?
We’ll look into next week.