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Daniel Bellhouse
Leeds, UK
The “tip of the tongue” feeling suggests that some parts of the memory network are activated, but not enough to fully recall the information, akin to having a faint signal but not the full transmission. Another analogy would be arriving at a filing cabinet with an index card pointing to a blank location. The presence of the index card suggests the information exists, but has been temporarily misplaced or misfiled. The brain interprets this as a transient situation, with the expectation that the information will be found with a little rummaging in nearby files.
Jon Hinwood
Melbourne, Australia
Until recently, I could tell with 90 per cent accuracy when I would remember a fact or name, ranging from “just hang on a minute” to “I’ll tell you in 20 minutes” to the deeply buried “that’ll come at dinnertime tomorrow”.
The long delays for some words suggest that the brain has to search through very large numbers of ever-weaker synaptic links with slow transmission rates before locating the target one. I think this is part of a complex cross-referenced mental catalogue that would also help recover a name if given the initial letter.
I still retain another catalogue stream: I can often recall the shape of a word that I am struggling to remember, how many syllables it has, which ones are stressed or elided, and whether there are any sibilants. Smell is also a powerful catalogue stream and sound is too, but both of these, I think, require practice to develop.
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