March 10, 2018 • 53 mins
Your know the feeling. You're trying to recall the name of a time-keeping musical device or the the actor who played Fredo in 'The Godfather' and all that comes to mind is a memory-hole in the shape of a metronome or John Cazale. It's on the tip of your tongue and it's a universal experience of memory retrieval. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, join Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick as they discuss the science of TOT phenomenon and what you can do to prevent it. (Originally published April 14, 2016)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
The Vault beckons, But the Vault it's it's trying to
tell me something. It's stammering a little bit though, it's
like it can't come up with that word it wants
to tell me. So I think it begins with the
t tip of the tongue. That's what it is. Yes,
(00:26):
So the Vault episode today originally aired April fourteen, two
thousand sixteen, and it's an episode we did about the
tip of the tongue phenomenon. In this episode, we'll discuss
what's actually going on in your brain when you can't
think of that particular word and that particular actor's name,
and then also what you can do to sort of
agrease the wheels a little bit and make it happen.
(00:49):
That's right, So we hope you enjoyed this episode on
the Tip of the Tongue. Welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind from how Stuff Work Dotcom. Hey, wasn't the
step to blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
(01:09):
and my name is Joe McCormick and We're gonna start
with a quick question. All right, I'll try to answers
as fast as you can. This is for everybody, This
is the listener. This is not a necessarily a meat
reco question. Right you you out there listening, what's the
word for a stone coffin, typically adorned with a sculpture
or inscription and associated with ancient Egypt, Rome or Greece.
(01:37):
Answer sarcophagus. Okay, a lot of you listeners probably knew
that word. It does come up quite a bit. I mean,
we we do talk about containers for dead bodies a lot,
an awful lot. I wonder why that happens. But anyway,
some of you knew that word, and some of you
knew it and you were able to say it immediately
you thought about it, or maybe you thought about it
for a split second and you just called it to mind, sarcophagus. Uh.
(02:01):
Some of you might not have been familiar with the word,
had no idea what it was, or maybe you just
didn't have any clue what we were getting at with it.
You knew the word, but you didn't you didn't think
we were heading in that direction. But then there's a
third category of you out there, some of you knew
that you knew the word, but you couldn't deliver it
on command. So you experienced this feeling of knowing, this
(02:24):
feeling that you are just about to consummate the retrieval
of that information from your memory. The word was. It
felt like it was right there, and you might have
made a noise. You might have gone, uh, I know
this and snapped your fingers like you had an itch
you couldn't scratch. And this is referred to in the
psychological literature as tip of the tongue phenomenon. When a
(02:47):
word is on the tip of your tongue, the feeling
of that tip of the tongue sensation is going to
be the subject of today's episode. Yeah, And it's often
abbreviated to t O t or taught. So yesterday I
did a lot of about tots, about TOTSA. We will
be talking about tots a good bit today. But if
you were stuck looking for the word, even momentarily, if
(03:09):
you you didn't call it to mind immediately, and you
weren't just completely stumped and had no idea, but you
were in that middle state where you knew you knew
the word, but you couldn't bring it to mind. Stop
for a second and reflect back on what that inner
experience was like, sort of review the cognitive journey you
traveled to try to find the right word. Before you
(03:30):
had the word, what did you feel did you have
a sense that you knew what letter the word started with?
Did you feel like you might have known how many
syllables the word had? Roughly? And once you heard the word,
were you write about those things? And did you keep
thinking of a similar word something that sounds kind of
(03:51):
like sarcophagus within going No, no, that's not the word. Here,
we're gonna do another one so you can have a
chance to think about it again. This time we're going
to do a proper name game. And this I have
to add, this is where I experience uh tip of
the tongue phenomenon the most, almost almost exclusively, Like I
really don't encounter the word based when any not much,
(04:12):
but when it comes to the names of actors, this
is like a weekly game I play in my head.
Uh huh. And we should add that Robert and I
played this game back and forth a little bit before
we went on air, and I think I stumped him
with this one. So what's the name of the actor
who played Fredo in The Godfather? Answer? John Kaze Yeah,
(04:37):
John Kazale. He was in The Godfather, Godfather Part two,
Dog Day Afternoon, what else, the Deer Hunter. I think
some of these, some of these big, these big Oscar
winning movies of the seventies. He died young. He was
a character actor, and he's one of those people who
I think a lot of people who like movies, who
who appreciate, especially you know, the critically acclaimed American cinema
(04:59):
having houndored his name at some point. Yeah, you would
know it. You wouldn't know that you had it back
in the in the casks of your memory somewhere, but
it's not easy to reach. Yeah, like we were discussing
before we rolled here in this episode, he he died young,
but he was a character actor. If he'd been a
leading man and he died at his age, we'd have
him on t shirts everywhere. But no, he was a
(05:21):
character actor, and and as a character actor you kind
of have to have enough films under your belt. You
have to, like he needed like another decade before he
would have reached the status of say Abou Simi or
you know, Ron Pearlman or any of these other character
actors who have have reached the point where they're just
such a part of our cinematic experience that we cannot
(05:41):
forget them right. And of course James Dean only had
a few movies, but leading Man there he'll be on
t shirts, so there will be biopics about him. Here's
the weird thing, just to throw in, like a personal
one of mine. And this may not be in the
case anymore because I keep talking about it with Joe
this week, but previously, Oliver read will come up a lot,
like I'll try remember who's that actor who played that role?
(06:02):
Who's the guy who's the lead in the Devil's the
guy who can't sing in Tommy? Yeah it was he
and Tommy. I don't know. I've never seen Tommy. He
plays Bill Sikes in a movie adaptation of Oliver. Yeah,
that would that would make sense. He's been He's been
in so many things, because I think his last one
was Gladiator. Wonderful actor, did some great movies, did some
(06:23):
horrible movies that are in their own way great, and
and I've seen plenty of them. But for some reason
it'll come up like I'll be watching Mystery Science Theater
through thousand with some friends, or just setting around thinking
about movies, and I'll picture him in his bearded, masculine glory,
and I'll try and remember his name, and it just
(06:43):
doesn't form. And so it's just like the phantom limbs
of my of my mind reaching out towards his face.
But you've captured the essence of tip of the tongue here,
because it's not just that you don't know. It's a
combination of not knowing and having the sense that you
really lee should know and you're just about to get it. Yeah.
(07:04):
And the weird thing about this, and of course this
is one of the challenges we wanted to kick off
this episode with an example, and when we wanted to
throw out some examples, but it's it's very difficult, if
not impossible, to find the perfect example of of a
t O T or a taught because it's gonna vary
depending on an individual's you know, personal mind map. Yeah.
(07:25):
One thing scientists have found in studying this phenomenon is
that it definitely happens more often with words we encounter
less frequently, and depending on who you are, you might
encounter some words more often than others. Robert and I
probably would not be stumped by sarcophagus as sarcophag guy
by sarcophagus the word, because like we said, we read
(07:45):
and talk about containers for dead bodies a whole lot,
but some people just probably don't talk about that all
that much. So if that's a more a less often
occurring word in your day to day language, you're probably
more likely to be stumped by it, right, And the
same is probably true for actors. Actors that you talk
about all the time are really probably not going to
give you a hard time. But the ones that you
(08:05):
logged in your memory at some point in the past
and have not come up since, those are the ones
where it's really likely to hit you hard. Yeah, a lot,
especially with you know, like that guy. Actors. They're sometimes
referred to as those character actors that have been in everything,
but there there maybe not. They're not even in that
Ron Pearlman, Steve b Simi area. You know that they're
(08:26):
the kind of actor who always plays a cop. Oh
you know, they always play a white cop in a film,
and therefore they just kind of completely all blend together.
Paul Marco and Conrad Brooks, Yeah, I guess the I
I have trouble picturing them, but I'm sure if you
showed me their photos right now, I would say, oh, yeah,
there the cops in the Edwood movies. Oh yes, yes, okay. So,
(08:46):
so we should look at what the scientists and psychologists
of history have made of this tip of the tongue phenomenon,
because it goes beyond just being like a weird curiosity
of everyday memory. It it's sort of an interesting way
to think about what happens when we try to interact
with words and uh and and information retrieval in our brains.
So William James, the American psychologist and philosopher, you might
(09:10):
be familiar with him from the Varieties of Religious Experience,
great text in the History of the Study of Religions. Yeah,
he's and he's definitely come up on the show before
in the past. Was he the brother of Henry James,
the writer? For some reason, I have that in my
mind that could be completely wrong. I don't know, But
if if not, I like the idea of exploring it
as like a retcon buddy picture, you know. But so
(09:33):
William James wrote about tip of the tongue phenomenon as
far as we know, he was one of the first
people to really write about it. Robert, why don't you
read William James quote about this, al right? He? This
is how he described it. He said, suppose we try
to recall a forgotten name. The state of our consciousness
is peculiar. There is a gap therein, but no mere gap.
(09:54):
It is a gap that is intensely active. A sort
of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us
in a given direction, making us at moments tingle with
the sense of our closeness, and then letting us sink
back without the longed for term. If wrong names are
proposed to us, this singularly definite gap acts immediately so
(10:15):
as to negate them. They do not fit into its mold,
And the gap of one word does not feel like
the gap of another, all empty of content, as both
might seem necessarily to be when described as gaps. I
really like this way of picturing it, because he's he's
casting the negative space there, the gap between your knowledge
(10:37):
that you know the word and the fact that you
can't call up the word as as a thing, a
literal thing like the negative space is in its own right,
uh and entity acting in your mind, because it negates
the other path when you know that, uh, it's not
this other word, you know, right when you're looking for
John Becazelle, you know it's not Al Pacino you're looking for.
(11:01):
You know it's not James con So the negative space
there is doing something is just not leading you to
John Kessale exactly. It's like there is a there is
a silhouette, there is an outline, there is a shape there,
and you know what, you know that certain things are
not going to fit in that shape. Okay, speaking of
that guy. Actors, how about this one? Who's the actor
(11:22):
who played Nancy's dad in a Nightmare on Elm Street. Answer?
It was John Saxon, of course, the great John Saxon.
Now you submitted that question and answer, But do you
think it would have stumped you? If you hadn't, it
would not have stumped me. Um, this was very much
one unlike Oliver Read. I know John Saxson when I
(11:45):
see him, and like the John Saxson, I guess it's
just more of a singular name. It sticks out more,
whereas Oliver Read. Even though Oliver Read was very much
one of a kind, his name is a little. Uh,
I don't know. It's a little British e. I don't know. Yeah,
John Saxon to me, I think i'd know him, or
from Enter the Dragon, where he plays the most boring
of all the fighters. He does play the most boring
(12:06):
about the fighters. He doesn't even really fight all that hard.
Just kind of happens to be in the right place
at the right time, doesn't he John Saxon in a nutshell? Okay,
So back to William James. So we said William James
was the first person to really describe the sensation that
we know about, but he didn't call it tip of
the tongue phenomenon. The name, as far as we know,
just comes from regular language, right, that's colloquial usage. Yeah,
(12:31):
it's it's apparently a universal thing. Uh. In particular, we
were looking at the nineteen and nine paper Sparkling at
the End of the Tongue, the ideology of tip of
the tongue phenomenology, and what they did is they surveyed
fifty one language and they found that forty five of them.
So that's about expressed the feeling of temporary inaccessibility with
(12:53):
the same tongue metaphor. Here yeah, and so you might
see this in terms of having the word on your
top or at the back of your tongue or in
the mouth or in the throat or something. Uh. The
one that's in the title of that paper, sparkling at
the end of the tongue is I should say, it's
worth noting that that expression comes from Korean and that's
(13:15):
just pure wildfire. It's so good, sparkling at the end
of the tongue. Yeah. That that kind of draws back
to that that the description from James that it's wraith like,
you know, this is supernatural energy to it. Uh. Interestingly enough,
of the the languages surveyed here, American sign language, Icelandic
to sub Saharan African languages, and Indonesian do not use
(13:37):
the tongue metaphor. Now Additionally, five languages Cantonese, Mandarin, Hindijasa,
and Ebo use the related expression in the mouth to
describe the experience. The Japanese use the expression out of
the throat and uh, and some use multiple metaphors, so
(13:57):
you'll have the tongue, but then you have another one
in use as well, with the French being in my opinion,
the most exciting because they use both the tip of
the tongue and hole in my head. Yeah, it's like, oh,
it's it's like I almost have it, but there's a
hole in my head. And it's I guess the thought
like flew out that the word just flew out of
(14:17):
my head and I cannot grasp it. Oh, that adds
a whole new meaning to I need to think of
John Kazale like I need a hole in my head. Yeah,
it's it's it's interesting. Uh. And certainly one of those
where you you know, you start thinking of languages is
kind of like little ecosystems of symbolism and metaphor and
if you uh and and and some of those ideas
(14:38):
are universal, some of them are confined to a number
of ecosystems, and some seem to be just perfectly encapsulated
within that particular language. Yeah, totally. So we're gonna come
back to that paper in a minute, but I do
want to go back and mention that they're of a
(15:00):
landmark paper in the study of tip of the tongue
phenomenon that came in nineteen sixty six by Roger Brown
and David McNeil, And this was just called the tip
of the tongue phenomenon published in the Journal of Verbal
Learning and Verbal Behavior, and these guys made some of
the first systematic observations of what happens during a tip
of the tongue state in an experimental setting. They define
(15:21):
tip of the tongue is a failure to recall a
word of which one has knowledge, again bringing these distinctions
of sort of stages of knowledge into things. So what
does it mean when you think you remember something but
you can't bring it to mind. And one of the
things they point out at the outside of their paper
is that it's interesting, like, if you can't recall the word,
(15:44):
how do we know that the person experiencing a tip
of the tongue state a tot if you will, actually
has knowledge of the word. What if it's just an
illusion that you actually have knowledge of the word. And
they think that's not the case, because you can observe
a couple of things. One of the things is that
sometimes people resolve the tip of the tongue state by themselves.
So you might sit there for a minute going like, oh, oh, oh,
(16:07):
I know it, I know it, and then figure it
out and then so that sort of proves that you
did actually have it. It's not just a phenomenal illusion
that you would have access to the word. And then
there are other cases where the purpose where the person,
even if they don't resolve the state by themselves, they
can recognize the word once it's presented from the outside,
(16:27):
and they can negate other words. So even if you
couldn't come up with John Kazale, you could say no,
not that actor, not that actor. No, no, no, you
could say no to all the other names in the world.
Someone says John Cassavetti's and you you instantly no, it's no,
it's not John Cassavetti's. But that might be enough to say, oh,
it's John Kazale, right. And that's one of the other
things that's really interesting and study of the tip of
(16:48):
the tongue phenomenon is that certain clues related to the
sound of the word can trigger it. They can send
you down the right path. But I like this description
they give what the tip of the tongue state is like.
They say, the signs of it were unmistakable. He would
appear to be in mild torment, something like the brink
of a sneeze, and if he found the word, his
(17:09):
relief was considerable. I think we've we've all find ourselves
in a situation. I don't know I'm speaking for everybody here,
but I'll speak for myself. I have certainly found myself
in the situation where a a tot is induced in
my own mind, and in a conversation with several people.
Everyone else moves on to something a little more more
than just and I'm still in that tot, and so
(17:31):
everything's just going on around me. And then I resolved
the tot, and then I disturbed the conversation again by
saying I was don knots don Knots played Barney five
or whatever the top mind and nobody else knows what
you're talking about. Everybody else has totally forgotten this what
what has actually been just a situation of mental anguish
for me for you know, a few seconds anyway. Yeah, okay,
(17:53):
so I think we've we we sorted described the phenomenon. Now.
It's it's these two main features. Inability to recall a
word or phrase, and then the subjective sensation that recall
is imminent, it's inbound, you're just about to have it.
But one of the really interesting things about this subject
is thinking about what broader implications this has for how
(18:13):
we understand language working in the brain, Like how does
the retrieval of a word happen when you're putting together
the language you speak? Just consider this for a second.
Usually speaking happens so fast you don't have time to
analyze it. When you go to speak a sentence, where
do your words come from? One of the creepiest things
(18:36):
is how little awareness we really seem to have of
how language comes out of us. So I start speaking
a sentence, and the sentence happens, but I don't really
know how it happened. I'm not consciously aware of choosing
each and every one of the words I use from
some kind of dictionary in my brain as I go along. Uh,
it just sort of happens and then it's out, and
(18:57):
I don't know what happened in between. But it's only
really in that tip of the tongue state. By contrast,
that the mystery of the regular fluidity of language becomes
so clear and so starkly weird. And it is weird,
isn't it. Like I I can't help but think now
about the difference between um, my my my spoken use
(19:18):
of language and my written use of language and not
just in the fact, and you know, the obvious fact
that with written language one has the opportunity to revise
and uh and shift things around and tweak it until
you get it in the exact form you want. But
just my you know, by the moment, my real time
use of language, I feel is rather different in both
the spoken in the written form. Yeah, yeah, I think
(19:42):
that's totally true. And in fact, I think I have
more of the sensation of consciously dealing with something like
a mental dictionary when I'm writing than when I'm talking.
When I'm talking, it feels much more mysterious and obscure
to me where the words come from. Yeah, Like, when
I'm writing, then there's like a little guy in my
head and he's going into a little library and saying,
(20:04):
you know, I think we'll have this word and this
word and this word. These are the ones we're going
to use, Whereas when I'm speaking, it's more like a
scene from a like a submarine movie. We're like, all right,
let's get the torpedoes in there. We've got to go,
We've got to go. He has to somehow express what
he wants on his sandwich. Is that the right word?
I don't care get it out there, because these sandwiches
have to happen and the sentences out before you even
(20:26):
know what happened. And then you may have had some
Freudian slips. You mentioned weird body organs that you didn't
mean to why why I don't know the Freudian slip
and another area worthy of consideration for future episode. You know.
I feel like we really should come up with our
own proprietary expression for tip of the tongue states. I
don't know exactly what it should be. Maybe we'll think
(20:46):
about it by the end of the episode. But I
do want to mention that in there was a paper
we looked at that that had it was called a
Review of the Tip of the Tongue Experience in Psychological
Bulletin by Alan Us Brown. And this is just a
helpful way to quickly summarize some quick findings since that
nineteen sixties six paper that are on the table about
(21:08):
what what's the deal with tip of the tongue? Well,
what does science found out? They found that one, it's
a nearly universal experience. Pretty much everybody experiences it. Number two,
on average, it occurs about once a week for people.
I feel like that sounds kind of low. It does,
I think we I mean, we just triggered it like
at least half a dozen times for each of us
in this conversation. Maybe unusual in US because we spend
(21:30):
way more time talking about movies that are full of
barely recognizable actors that we feel like lots of forgettable names. Yeah. Um,
the number three they say it increases with age. Number four.
It's frequently elicited by proper names, so probably more often
than dictionary words. It's you're going to be searching for
who was that actor, who was that famous person because
(21:52):
these were these names are not necessarily part of your vocabulary,
and you're yeah, and it's it's I feel like it's
going to be more memorable than your tempt to use
a word or recognize a word that exists kind of
outside of your standard palette. Yeah. So fifth observation is
it often enables access to the target words first letter.
There's a really common experience you you're in a tip
(22:13):
of the tongue state. You can't remember the word, but
you can remember what it starts with. Yeah, Like I
don't remember what those really weird pyramid things are that
they had in the ancient world. But they began with
a Z what were they? What was it? And then
you remember zig zigaratte. Yeah, I'm sneaking Ziggy Stardust, Yeah
I wanted the too, Okay. Six These the tip of
the tongue states are often accompanied by words related to
(22:36):
the target. Again, you can come up with ziggy star dust,
but not zigguratte right, Or if it's you're trying to
remember that characters, that character actor's name, you'll remember every
film he was in and maybe some of the the
the characters that he played. Yeah, and then the final
thing is uh. The tip of the tongue states are
resolved during the experience about half of the time, so
it's it's only about half of the time that it's
(22:57):
just unresolved anguish. You just end in torture that fades
out and you get washed away into the sea of
experience and never find an end to your problem. Now
as well discussed though the our age of of smartphones
than just almost you know, constant internet connection. I feel
it has has has changed the scenario used to if
(23:19):
you couldn't think of of the of the name of
of an actor, like he just had to maybe go
home and look through your old film magazines or ask
around until somebody identified Fredo for you. But now you're
just a click away. So it just comes down to
like how long am I willing to suffer I find
myself in this very scenario. Like sometimes there's a sense
(23:40):
of pride, like I'm gonna remember this on my own.
I'm not going to go to the smartphone because I
should know who this actor is. It's it's much more
satisfying to do it without cheating, right and then, But
then other times you might be like, screw it. I
need I need to know. I don't care if I'm
driving a car. I need to know who played the
High Priest and beast Master. I have no idea. Here's
(24:00):
one where I'm not having Tip of the tongue. I
just I have no clue. He had a very uh
try to try to he had. He has a very
pronounced nose, a very hawk like nose in that film,
and not David Warner. He was in the sequel or
maybe the third one. Okay, No, I I just had
no idea. He really didn't know one tip of the tongue.
(24:22):
I completely outside my memory experience. Yeah, all right, well,
you know, shame on you for not remembering the priest.
But that's understandable. Okay, quick question. This is a toy
musical instrument that produces a buzzing tone when a person
hums into the mouth hole. Answer kazoo. No that one.
(24:45):
I think that would have stumped me a little bit.
Not that I don't know the word kazoo, but i'd
be I'd be like, wait, what what? What a toy?
I'd be thinking of something else. Anyway, Okay, here I
got another one for you. So what's the word for
a chemical having pH greater than seven? It's the opposite
of the word acidic, a synonym of the word basic.
(25:09):
You probably encountered this sometime in school. The word is alkaline.
A base is an alkaline. And this one, this one
threw me for a curve the other day. But though
I'm not completely sure of it was a full on
tot because I think I was trying to remember the
wrong word. Oh yeah, what was the word? I can't remember?
Because now all I can remember his his alkaline. Okay,
(25:29):
well we should look at these explanatory theories. What's going
on when you're having a tot in your brain? And
here a big help is one of the papers we
mentioned earlier, that paper Sparkling at the End of the
Tongue the Ideology of the Tip of the Tongue phenomenology.
Horrible name, but very clear, laying out of a bunch
of the different theories that have been put forward over
the years in explaining how tip of the tongue states
(25:53):
could be coming about. And there all the explanatory theories
are are mostly grouped under two your ferent umbrella terms. Right,
that's right, So we basically have direct access views and
inferential views. Okay, let's start with direct access views. Just
as an overall, direct access views argue that tots arise
(26:14):
from sensitivity to the unretrieved target. So, in other words,
the memory item in question isn't strong enough for you
to recall it, but there's still strong enough to signal
a TOT. So I like to think of this in
terms of a murder is taken place because there's a
mystery here, right, there's a problem to be solved. And
this is like the witness saying, look, Officer, I glimpse
the murderer and the shadows, but I couldn't quite make
(26:37):
them out. I can almost name a suspect. Yeah, I
think this one, I'm gonna have a little metaphor here.
We'll see how it works out. But if I understand
this view correctly, I think these are the types of
explanations where it's like you have the starting point and
you have the ending point, but you're just failing to
make a connection between them, as opposed to this other
(26:58):
type of view. We're going to talk about the inferential view,
and now what's the deal with that. Inferential views claim
that tots are not based directly on an inaccessible but
activated targets. In other words, tots arise from clues. Okay,
so this would be like the detective saying I didn't
see the murderer. I wasn't there, but based on the evidence,
(27:18):
I can almost name a suspect. Okay, So in my
other analogy, if the first one was I have the
start point, to have the endpoint, and I just can't
quite connect them, this would be more like I have
the start point and I think I can find my
way to an ending point. Yeah. Like it's kind of
like if you were faced with the John Cassale situation.
My understanding of this would be like, maybe I don't
(27:39):
actually remember John Cassale's name. But I've seen enough of
his pictures I can and I and I know his face,
I know his roles. I should be able to like
I have. Surely, surely I am the type of person
who knows John Casale's name. Yeah, I can put it together.
And in this case, I think, Uh, the feeling of
knowing the word that you experience is uh, it's not
(28:00):
based on the word being activated in memory, but your
brain is subconsciously judging that it has enough information to
circuitously figure out the word. If you'll, if you'll just
give me a moment, if you know, you just have
a second. Um. So it's not the presence of the
word itself that's exciting you, but it's your unconscious confidence
in your own lexical detective powers to pick up on
(28:21):
your detective metaphor. Indeed, alright, so at this point, let's
break them out a little a little further here. Okay,
so under these direct access views, Okay, we've got a
few different, uh, different ones explained in this paper. Yeah.
Basically they center on three, um, three sub hypotheses. There's
(28:41):
the blocking hypothesis. Blocking hypothesis says that toughts occur when
a retrieval cue prompts retrieval of an incorrect but closely
related word, and we realize it's incorrect, thus the blank.
So it's like you're trying to remember John Casale's name,
you remember somebody else's name. You're like, no, that's not it.
The blank makes itself now. It's like if your Google
(29:04):
Maps is constantly telling you over and over to go
to the wrong destination. You keep going there, but you
every time you recognize it's wrong, so you just back
up and start over, so you never go anywhere. It's
kind of like I like, I, I've basically said this
sentence before it with different words. But it's if I'm
trying to remember all of a Read and I say,
I want to say Rex Harrison, but I know that's wrong,
(29:24):
you know, like I I know the thing that's coming
to mind is definitely not it. Yeah, but I can't
remember Oliver Read's name. You have a path blaze through
the woods of your memory that's taking you to the
wrong destination, but it's just too well forged. You can't
stop following it, alright. The next one is the incomplete
activation hypothesis. This holds that Taught's happen when we can't
(29:47):
recall the target word, but since its presence nonetheless. Okay,
so this sounds just like the basic failure hypothesis, the
failure to connect. You really do have the word in memory,
but you just can't quite get there for some reason,
some some strength of connection does not exist. Yeah, maybe
you're you're you're a little tired, you're worn out. Everything
is not really firing at maximum speed, and you just
(30:10):
can't reach it. What's the next one? Transmission deficit model? Okay,
this says that tats arise from a multi component memory representation.
You retrieve the image, the semantic meaning of the thing,
(30:31):
but not the word. So maybe the sound, even the smell,
but not the word. Oh, you mean, like the semantics
associated with the concept of the word. But what you're
searching for is the sound of the word, and you
can't do that exactly. So those are the three main
direct access views. Okay, those are those are the I
saw I saw the killer in the shadows, but now
I can't exactly remember his face, right, But what's the
(30:54):
what are the detective views? The inferential views? All right,
there are two main ones here. The first one is
Q familiar charity theory, and this holds that toughts are
based on an assessment of the level of recognition of
a particular cue or question. What does that mean? You
don't have to actually have the memory items stored away.
But and this is my read on this one, is
that you feel like you should know it. So this
(31:15):
is more directly related to what I said earlier about
inferential views, like I feel like I'm the type of
person who should know that, and I believe that strongly
enough that I'm straining to remember it. Okay, But it
seems like, just from my uh naive viewpoint, maybe it
seems like that one would have a harder time explaining
those cases where you have a tought, you feel like
(31:36):
you're about to remember something, and then you do remember it. Yeah,
It's like this one was harder for me to like,
it's harder for me to to read this one and
then think back and try and feel like and recognize
it in my own experience. I feel like the best
I can come up with is maybe like trying to
remember state capitals of states that I don't think about anymore.
(32:00):
Because there's definitely a point in everybody's hister whe had
to memorize all the states and their capitals, or various
other things like memorizing the periodic table, or memorizing, you know,
all the nations of Africa. That kind of thing, the
kind of thing you end up not carrying around with it,
but at some point you knew it, and you know
that you knew it, even if you don't actually remember
it anymore. Oh, but maybe you're thinking you can piece
it together from other pieces of information in your brain
(32:22):
that are more readily accessible, Like maybe you can remember
the state capitals if you can picture a map in
your head. Yeah, or think of the sports teams that
are associated with it. I don't know, Okay, that that
makes more sense. And then there's one more explanation under
the inferential umbrella, right yes. Accessibility heuristic tots are based
(32:45):
on the amount and intensity of partial information that remembers
retrieve when they cannot recall a target answer, So I
remember everything but her name. I should be able to
remember her name. That's that's my I read on this.
So so you do friends between a TOT and just
not knowing something is is how much other stuff peripheral
(33:06):
to this word you remember, especially if it's really intense
like I can remember what her hair smells like I can,
or I can remember, you know, staring into his nostril
holes and seeing the hairs there. Why can't I remember
his name? Why is this so intense and yet the
name alludes me? I should know this person. I was
trapped in a cave with them for three weeks. We
(33:28):
had to do unspeakable things to survive. Why can't I
remember his first name? That sort of thing? Now, the
reason you couldn't remember his first name is because you
know what he did to you. He made a bar
hole in your skull to suppose a small part of
your brain. But what's the word for that process when
you drill a little hole in somebody's skull. Well, your answer,
(33:52):
of course is prepanation in or trepanning. Yeah, or if
you're a modern neurosurgeon, you might call it craniotomy smarty pants,
But we're we're referring to the Stone Age practice personally here.
That's a good one, because it's a word that I
bet a lot of people have heard at some point,
but you don't use it all that often unless you're us. Yeah, yeah,
it's come up without quite a bit here, But and
(34:14):
it certainly our listeners may have it stored away as well,
but otherwise it didn't come up in the real world
too often. Okay, So, as we've mentioned, there are a
bunch of different theories that have been proposed over the
years as to how you might explain different versions of
the tip of the tongue state. But the real question,
of course, I know people people want the answer to
is how do you overcome it? Or maybe just how
(34:35):
do you avoid making it worse? Because it truly can
feel like agony. It's a petty agony, but it's agony nonetheless. Okay,
never fear. We do actually have some news for you
on on how to affect your tip of the tongue
recurrent states, but it might not all be good news.
Uh So, so let's start with some particularly bad news. Robert,
(34:55):
did you know that the more time you spend in
the tip of the tongue state, the less likely you
are to remember the word the next time. This is
crazy because it makes because it's easy to fall into
that thinking where I don't want to grab my smartphone,
I'm want to think of think of this up myself,
even if it takes me. You know, the better part
of an hour, I'm going to reach it myself. It
feels like that should strengthen the muscle, right. Well, I
(35:18):
mean there might be something to that, as we're going
to see from a study in in just a second.
But how many times does that process lead to correct
resolution of the tip of the tongue of state? A
lot of times you just failed, don't you? Well, I
don't fail, not with you end up cheating. Well, that's
the thing. I either end up cheating eventually. But I
(35:39):
feel like if I apply my mind to it long enough,
I get there with actors names, because that's my sickness.
But but yeah, I can't think of a single situation
where I've said, well, I just can't think of who
played Who was Danny's mom in Kubricks the Shining Oh
(36:01):
she also was she also Olive Oil and the Robert
Altman Popeye movie. Yes, yes, she was great. But yeah, Okay.
So there's a study from two eight by a scientists
Amy Beth Warrener and Karen Are Humphreys called learning to
(36:22):
Fail Reoccurring Tip of the tongue states you can already
tell from the title that this is going to bring
some bad news for people who have this petti agony
of the tip of the tongue journey. Um. So, the
hypothesis going into this experiment was that if you make
an error once, you're more likely to make it again
by way of what they call a quote implicit learning mechanism.
(36:44):
The more you fail, you the better you forge that
path to failure. If you go with the metaphor we
had earlier about blazing a trail through the woods, every
time you walk down the wrong path to the wrong destination,
that path just gets better and better to find. You.
You're more brush out of the way, you make footprints,
you you trample down, and and it just becomes easier
(37:05):
and easier to find your way to failure every time.
So how did this study work? They played a definition
game kind of like the one we've been playing, where
they read you a definition of a of a low
frequency word, what's the word? And when a subject entered
a t ot state, they were randomly given a delay
of either ten seconds or thirty seconds to recall the word,
(37:27):
and then after the delay period, the experiment or would
give them the words. So, if you're looking for sarcophagus,
you can't get it for either ten seconds or thirty
seconds at random. They then give you the words sarcophagus,
oh okay, And two days later the participants came back
to the lab to be tested again on the same words,
(37:48):
and some participants got stuck on the same words they've
been stuck on just two days before. And strangely, the
results of the test showed that tip of the tongue
states were twice as likely to happen on words where
the subject spent thirty seconds in the tip of the
tongue state than in words where they spent ten seconds
in the tip of the tongue state. So the longer
(38:09):
you spent in that state of saying I know this,
I know this, but not being able to call it up,
the worse you got at remembering the word in the future.
And in the words of the authors quote, we argue
that this longer delay in h t ot state amounts
to a greater implicit learning of the erroneous state. You're
(38:29):
just practicing how to get worse and I uh, you know.
One of the interesting questions I was thinking about was
what to do with this information in a general sense,
because I do certainly believe that you can practice yourself
to get worse at something. I know a lot of
people have a kind of, um, very broadly practiced positive mindset.
(38:52):
I know I encountered this in writing workshops, where it
was just sort of the idea that there's no such
thing as bad practice. The more you write, the better
you're to get. And I do generally, of course, think
practice makes people better at almost any craft or skill,
but not all practice is good. I I am personally
of the opinion that you can right yourself into a
(39:12):
rut that makes you a worse writer the more you
do it well. One one way that I was thinking
about this earlier is in terms of of doing yoga. Um,
that's something I can relate to since I practice yoga.
But yeah, you can practice yoga every day, you can
go to a yoga class every day. But if you're
being instructed to do a pose in a way that
(39:35):
is incorrect or is in some way like long term
detrimental to you, Like you know, something where you're putting
too much pressure on your knee or you're bracing yourself
against your knee in a weird way, Um, yeah, you
can practice something the wrong way and and ultimately make
things worse. Yeah, in a way that you're you're not
just being unproductive, but you're literally backtracking your your things
(39:57):
are getting worse for you. I And so there's a
follow up to this though, that does have an interesting
tip we can take away. One of the authors of
this original study, Karen Humphreys, co authored another study that
came out just last year in with Maria C. D'Angelo,
and it was called Tip of the Tongue states reoccur
(40:17):
because of implicit learning, but resolving them helps. So they're
building on this previous research that said that speakers tend
to exhibit taught states for the same words over and over.
And they played this same game again, the definition game.
I'll read you a definition, you give me the low
frequency word, and they actually carried out six different experiments
(40:38):
in the study. They found a range of things. One
of them that they just replicated earlier findings about the
error state making things worse. What we were just talking about,
you can practice how to fail and get better at failing. Um,
you sit there in the taught state and you're just
getting worse and worse at remembering the word. But they
also found that subjects could decrease their likelihood of experiencing
(41:01):
this taught state on a single word in the future
if they were able to resolve the taught state on
their own, as opposed to not resolving it or having
the words supplied by a third party. So, right, so
if you can figure out a way to to find
that word from from your own mind without cheating, you
are less likely to have the taught state for that
(41:24):
word in the future. But then again, I mean, that's
kind of not very helpful advice, is it, Like, just
be told you must solve this problem in order to
not continue having this problem. It certainly makes tots uh
when you experience them, feel more like a ticking time bomb,
right right, But it it sounds though like the the
ideal situation here is you need to make sure that
(41:44):
you and your your immediate circle of you know, family
or friends are in a position to where you're they're
going to help you get it yourself exactly, because fortunately
they did find that this works. They figured out this
way that the experiment or can help without an gating
the corrective effect of self resolution. So you just give
(42:05):
hints that that's the way to resolve the taught state.
If the experiment or gives what they called orthographic cues,
so basically cues related to like the spelling of the word.
This would allow people to correct the bad retrieval pathway themselves,
and the authors conclude quote, these findings reinforce the notion
that the language production system is dynamic and continually learning
(42:27):
from experience, even when that experience is error full. Okay,
well let me try one out on everybody to to
to experiment with this. Who played the secretary in Ghostbusters?
All right? Can you think of it? If you can't,
let's not just give away the answer. What are some hints?
(42:48):
All right? What word? Letter does it start with? First name,
begins with A, last name begins with P. Last name
sounds like something you might boil water? In answer, Annie Potts,
Oh there you go. So hopefully that was less damaging
(43:09):
to your brain because we we we supplied a few
hints along the way so that you could still get
it yourself, unless we got there before you were you
were able to say it yourself, in which case I'm sorry.
We've condemned you to possible future taughts with anything. We
should have asked you to posit, But then again, we
didn't want to spend too long on a data Yeah, Okay,
So it may seem like there's essentially an ascending order
(43:30):
of preference if you want to avoid future taught states.
So it sounds like the worst case is probably just
sitting in the taught state and never resolving it. You
don't want to do that. Better but still not great
is looking up the answer, better but still not The
best is looking up the answer very quickly, as quickly
as you can, so spend as little time as possible
(43:50):
in that taught state. But if you're on your own,
you know, unless you want to call a friend, that's
the best thing to do, right And then, so the
best option seems like, uh, figuring out the name for
yourself and if necessary, getting hints from people around you
that have to do with like what letter it starts
with or what it sounds like. This would be something
worthwhile in future versions of Siri, Right, so that series
(44:14):
not just answering your question, but series providing you a
hint so that you can get it yourself quickly. Interesting,
or maybe that would just be about being able to
ask a specific question like Sirie, what is the first
letter in the first name of the secretary? And Ghostbusters?
Oh man, if I would I shell out for an
unlocked iPhone. If I could just get Sirie to do
(44:35):
that maybe maybe. Now, are there any other any other
clear answers on ways to avoid taught states? I don't
know if we found any other clear ones. Some confused ones. Yeah,
like the coffee thing is confusing. Um, like maybe drink
coffee or maybe not. It depends on where you look. Uh.
(44:55):
Where we were looking at two thousand fourteen paper caffeine
priming in the tip of the tongue evidence for plasticity
in the phonological system, and I found that caffeine can
both increase and decrease the number of tots depending on
the experiment. This study found that caffeine might hinder your
short term recall of certain words, while past studies have
(45:17):
have illustrated the caffeine can perhaps help prevent tots. So
maybe we shouldn't use tots here because everybody wants to
increase their number of tots. We should say to the
tongue states, yeah, well you know, I like tots. It
goes back to childhood when you're in the lunch line
at school. Who doesn't wish you had more toughts? So
they only give you like seven. It's horrible. Well, the
(45:38):
thing is, now I am going to discuss them as tats.
So when I'm trying to think of someone's name, now
among you know what I'm hanging out with people, I'm
gonna start saying I'm having a tot. Here, I'm having
a tot, and I can have no clue what I'm
talking about. Right. Another way to involve drugs, if you
might want to avoid tots in a in a cheating,
roundabout way, UH is taking some thing like LaRaza pam.
(46:01):
But now we're not advising you take Larazo pam recreationally
or even to improve performance, because it doesn't actually improve performance.
It's not going to help you avoid tots in that
it will help you claim the word earlier. It may
help you avoid tots in that you'll be wrong and
you won't care. You're not going to experience that. This
(46:21):
is what they found is that when people are on
this drug and they get the word wrong, they don't
have this sense of I know it, it's imminent. They
just say, whatever retrieves you say. Uh. Rex Harrison played
The Secretary and Ghostbusters and they never had all right,
(46:41):
let's have another one, Joe, what do you got Okay,
how about this one. What's the time and date? Happens
twice each year where the sun crosses over the celestial
equator where the night and the day are the same length.
Answer acts, No, it's equinox galax. Escalax, of course, is
(47:01):
uh a medication that you take when you can't poop, right,
escal acis escalax a mythical creature, and escalax escalax is
a mythical creature that you summon when you can't put
It has the magical ability to help you. Pip. I
think the escalax comes from the Simpsons. It's a it's
a horse with the head of a rabbit and the
(47:22):
body of a rabbit. Okay, I was not familiar with
that one. That's a good one. Okay. One more fact
I wanted to talk about before we wrap up, which
I did think was kind of interesting, and that's simply
the fact that there is an equivalent phenomenon. Now, you
said that the earlier study found that there wasn't a
tip of the tongue expression in American sign language, but
(47:43):
there is a recognized tip of the fingers phenomenon deaf signers.
And I think this is really interesting because when I'm
thinking about what's going on in the tip of the
tongue phenomenon. There seems to be a disconnect between the semantics.
You have the semantics, you know what the word means,
or you know what the actor's face looks like, or
what movies he or she was in or something like that.
(48:06):
You know, you have all the meaning information, you just
can't connect it to the word, to the sounds of
the words. There's a disconnect between semantics and phonology. But
in in in sign language, you're not necessarily involving sounds. There,
you might be involving hand motions and and different types
of where the hands are placed, what you do with
(48:27):
your fingers, the movement involved in the hand motions to
gesture the name, and so there have been observations and
studies about this tip of the fingers phenomenon, and I
just thought that that was a very interesting parallel. It
seems like the tip of whatever doesn't necessarily have to
be sound. Yeah, that's interesting. It takes the same mental
(48:48):
process outside of the sonic realm. Yeah. Like one of
the things observed about it is that signers were often
able to recall the first letter of a finger spelled
word isn't that interesting the same way that you can
usually you know, you can think, oh, any pots, Well
you can't think of any pots, but I know her
name started with an A. People who who deaf signers
(49:11):
can do the same thing it started with and then
the hand sign for an A. Interesting that there's a
whole study about this, if you want to look at up.
It's called Tip of the Fingers Experiences by Deaf Signers,
Insights into the Organization of a sign based Lexicon and
Psychological Science in two thousand five. Anyway, I find this
topic really interesting, not just because of the phenomenon, but
(49:33):
because of what I brought up at the in the
earlier section about how it highlights weird things about the
nature of language that we don't usually think about, like
the One of the things is what people talk about
in semiotics, you know, the difference between the signifier and
the signified that we just often don't recognize that gap
in between them, like the gap William James talks about there,
(49:55):
uh that we can so easily come to identify a
word with the thing it means, but the word is
not the thing, and these these gaps where we have
the object in mind, we have the face in mind,
but we can't make the sounds to make it. Highlights
some of the weird mechanical nature of meaning and its
(50:15):
relationship to science in our universe. Yeah, it's like when
the machine is working, we don't think twice about it
because we are we are the machine. But but when
when When there are catastrophic errors, that's one thing. But
these are every day, or at least according to the
study we're looking at, at least every week. We experience
these errors, and it provides us just a little insight
(50:36):
into what's going on. I think these errors can bring
up interesting facts about our brain in the same way
that seeing glitches in a computer game can make you
understand a lot more about programming and how the game works,
because you might be say you're playing a computer game
in some kind of three D rendered world, and you're
just having it as a pure experience. You're in the world,
(50:57):
you know, it's all real, and your characters real. Being
in the world is real, and suddenly a glitch starts happening.
You run through a wall or something, or part of
your you know, your arm comes off and floats free
or something, and it suddenly snaps you back into the
reality that that none of this is a true, organic,
real experience. But it's all bits, you know, objects and
(51:18):
bits of code that are functioning together perfectly well most
of the time. But suddenly you understand what all the
different bits and shapes are and how they're made, and
how they have to come together to create this seamless experience. Yeah,
there's always something, there's something kind of magical about, Like
the first time you walk through a wall and doom
and you're standing in the sort of that the ether
(51:41):
outside of the of the game and you but you
can look down and see those hallways just floating into nothing. Yeah.
And then of course up above there's the face of
John Kazee looking over all of us. Indeed, along with
any pots and don knots, a complete pantheon of of
(52:02):
taught actors. Okay, that's all I got. You got anything else?
That's all I got? Um, Hey, but I know that
everyone out there has some experience with this. What's the
word that always sets you off? Yeah? What's that that
one actor that never comes to mind when you try
and imagine, try and try and remember their names. We'd
love to hear from you on all of that. In
(52:23):
the meantime, check out stuff Toble your Mind dot com.
That's where you'll find oh podcast episodes, videos. We have
some cool new animated things that are going up where
it's a little animated shorties that are clipped out of
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(52:44):
media accounts such as Twitter and Facebook. We're blow the
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And if you want to get in touch with us
with feedback about this episode or any other recent episodes,
or if you want to let us know that thing,
that thing that always sets you off, you just know it,
it's just there. I'm just about to get it, but
(53:05):
you can't quite get it. You can email us and
you may just have to describe what it is because
you can't come up with the word at blow the
mind at how stuff works dot com for more on
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff
(53:27):
works dot com. Love Love Love
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
The Vault beckons, But the Vault it's it's trying to
tell me something. It's stammering a little bit though, it's
like it can't come up with that word it wants
to tell me. So I think it begins with the
t tip of the tongue. That's what it is. Yes,
(00:26):
So the Vault episode today originally aired April fourteen, two
thousand sixteen, and it's an episode we did about the
tip of the tongue phenomenon. In this episode, we'll discuss
what's actually going on in your brain when you can't
think of that particular word and that particular actor's name,
and then also what you can do to sort of
agrease the wheels a little bit and make it happen.
(00:49):
That's right, So we hope you enjoyed this episode on
the Tip of the Tongue. Welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind from how Stuff Work Dotcom. Hey, wasn't the
step to blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
(01:09):
and my name is Joe McCormick and We're gonna start
with a quick question. All right, I'll try to answers
as fast as you can. This is for everybody, This
is the listener. This is not a necessarily a meat
reco question. Right you you out there listening, what's the
word for a stone coffin, typically adorned with a sculpture
or inscription and associated with ancient Egypt, Rome or Greece.
(01:37):
Answer sarcophagus. Okay, a lot of you listeners probably knew
that word. It does come up quite a bit. I mean,
we we do talk about containers for dead bodies a lot,
an awful lot. I wonder why that happens. But anyway,
some of you knew that word, and some of you
knew it and you were able to say it immediately
you thought about it, or maybe you thought about it
for a split second and you just called it to mind, sarcophagus. Uh.
(02:01):
Some of you might not have been familiar with the word,
had no idea what it was, or maybe you just
didn't have any clue what we were getting at with it.
You knew the word, but you didn't you didn't think
we were heading in that direction. But then there's a
third category of you out there, some of you knew
that you knew the word, but you couldn't deliver it
on command. So you experienced this feeling of knowing, this
(02:24):
feeling that you are just about to consummate the retrieval
of that information from your memory. The word was. It
felt like it was right there, and you might have
made a noise. You might have gone, uh, I know
this and snapped your fingers like you had an itch
you couldn't scratch. And this is referred to in the
psychological literature as tip of the tongue phenomenon. When a
(02:47):
word is on the tip of your tongue, the feeling
of that tip of the tongue sensation is going to
be the subject of today's episode. Yeah, And it's often
abbreviated to t O t or taught. So yesterday I
did a lot of about tots, about TOTSA. We will
be talking about tots a good bit today. But if
you were stuck looking for the word, even momentarily, if
(03:09):
you you didn't call it to mind immediately, and you
weren't just completely stumped and had no idea, but you
were in that middle state where you knew you knew
the word, but you couldn't bring it to mind. Stop
for a second and reflect back on what that inner
experience was like, sort of review the cognitive journey you
traveled to try to find the right word. Before you
(03:30):
had the word, what did you feel did you have
a sense that you knew what letter the word started with?
Did you feel like you might have known how many
syllables the word had? Roughly? And once you heard the word,
were you write about those things? And did you keep
thinking of a similar word something that sounds kind of
(03:51):
like sarcophagus within going No, no, that's not the word. Here,
we're gonna do another one so you can have a
chance to think about it again. This time we're going
to do a proper name game. And this I have
to add, this is where I experience uh tip of
the tongue phenomenon the most, almost almost exclusively, Like I
really don't encounter the word based when any not much,
(04:12):
but when it comes to the names of actors, this
is like a weekly game I play in my head.
Uh huh. And we should add that Robert and I
played this game back and forth a little bit before
we went on air, and I think I stumped him
with this one. So what's the name of the actor
who played Fredo in The Godfather? Answer? John Kaze Yeah,
(04:37):
John Kazale. He was in The Godfather, Godfather Part two,
Dog Day Afternoon, what else, the Deer Hunter. I think
some of these, some of these big, these big Oscar
winning movies of the seventies. He died young. He was
a character actor, and he's one of those people who
I think a lot of people who like movies, who
who appreciate, especially you know, the critically acclaimed American cinema
(04:59):
having houndored his name at some point. Yeah, you would
know it. You wouldn't know that you had it back
in the in the casks of your memory somewhere, but
it's not easy to reach. Yeah, like we were discussing
before we rolled here in this episode, he he died young,
but he was a character actor. If he'd been a
leading man and he died at his age, we'd have
him on t shirts everywhere. But no, he was a
(05:21):
character actor, and and as a character actor you kind
of have to have enough films under your belt. You
have to, like he needed like another decade before he
would have reached the status of say Abou Simi or
you know, Ron Pearlman or any of these other character
actors who have have reached the point where they're just
such a part of our cinematic experience that we cannot
(05:41):
forget them right. And of course James Dean only had
a few movies, but leading Man there he'll be on
t shirts, so there will be biopics about him. Here's
the weird thing, just to throw in, like a personal
one of mine. And this may not be in the
case anymore because I keep talking about it with Joe
this week, but previously, Oliver read will come up a lot,
like I'll try remember who's that actor who played that role?
(06:02):
Who's the guy who's the lead in the Devil's the
guy who can't sing in Tommy? Yeah it was he
and Tommy. I don't know. I've never seen Tommy. He
plays Bill Sikes in a movie adaptation of Oliver. Yeah,
that would that would make sense. He's been He's been
in so many things, because I think his last one
was Gladiator. Wonderful actor, did some great movies, did some
(06:23):
horrible movies that are in their own way great, and
and I've seen plenty of them. But for some reason
it'll come up like I'll be watching Mystery Science Theater
through thousand with some friends, or just setting around thinking
about movies, and I'll picture him in his bearded, masculine glory,
and I'll try and remember his name, and it just
(06:43):
doesn't form. And so it's just like the phantom limbs
of my of my mind reaching out towards his face.
But you've captured the essence of tip of the tongue here,
because it's not just that you don't know. It's a
combination of not knowing and having the sense that you
really lee should know and you're just about to get it. Yeah.
(07:04):
And the weird thing about this, and of course this
is one of the challenges we wanted to kick off
this episode with an example, and when we wanted to
throw out some examples, but it's it's very difficult, if
not impossible, to find the perfect example of of a
t O T or a taught because it's gonna vary
depending on an individual's you know, personal mind map. Yeah.
(07:25):
One thing scientists have found in studying this phenomenon is
that it definitely happens more often with words we encounter
less frequently, and depending on who you are, you might
encounter some words more often than others. Robert and I
probably would not be stumped by sarcophagus as sarcophag guy
by sarcophagus the word, because like we said, we read
(07:45):
and talk about containers for dead bodies a whole lot,
but some people just probably don't talk about that all
that much. So if that's a more a less often
occurring word in your day to day language, you're probably
more likely to be stumped by it, right, And the
same is probably true for actors. Actors that you talk
about all the time are really probably not going to
give you a hard time. But the ones that you
(08:05):
logged in your memory at some point in the past
and have not come up since, those are the ones
where it's really likely to hit you hard. Yeah, a lot,
especially with you know, like that guy. Actors. They're sometimes
referred to as those character actors that have been in everything,
but there there maybe not. They're not even in that
Ron Pearlman, Steve b Simi area. You know that they're
(08:26):
the kind of actor who always plays a cop. Oh
you know, they always play a white cop in a film,
and therefore they just kind of completely all blend together.
Paul Marco and Conrad Brooks, Yeah, I guess the I
I have trouble picturing them, but I'm sure if you
showed me their photos right now, I would say, oh, yeah,
there the cops in the Edwood movies. Oh yes, yes, okay. So,
(08:46):
so we should look at what the scientists and psychologists
of history have made of this tip of the tongue phenomenon,
because it goes beyond just being like a weird curiosity
of everyday memory. It it's sort of an interesting way
to think about what happens when we try to interact
with words and uh and and information retrieval in our brains.
So William James, the American psychologist and philosopher, you might
(09:10):
be familiar with him from the Varieties of Religious Experience,
great text in the History of the Study of Religions. Yeah,
he's and he's definitely come up on the show before
in the past. Was he the brother of Henry James,
the writer? For some reason, I have that in my
mind that could be completely wrong. I don't know, But
if if not, I like the idea of exploring it
as like a retcon buddy picture, you know. But so
(09:33):
William James wrote about tip of the tongue phenomenon as
far as we know, he was one of the first
people to really write about it. Robert, why don't you
read William James quote about this, al right? He? This
is how he described it. He said, suppose we try
to recall a forgotten name. The state of our consciousness
is peculiar. There is a gap therein, but no mere gap.
(09:54):
It is a gap that is intensely active. A sort
of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us
in a given direction, making us at moments tingle with
the sense of our closeness, and then letting us sink
back without the longed for term. If wrong names are
proposed to us, this singularly definite gap acts immediately so
(10:15):
as to negate them. They do not fit into its mold,
And the gap of one word does not feel like
the gap of another, all empty of content, as both
might seem necessarily to be when described as gaps. I
really like this way of picturing it, because he's he's
casting the negative space there, the gap between your knowledge
(10:37):
that you know the word and the fact that you
can't call up the word as as a thing, a
literal thing like the negative space is in its own right,
uh and entity acting in your mind, because it negates
the other path when you know that, uh, it's not
this other word, you know, right when you're looking for
John Becazelle, you know it's not Al Pacino you're looking for.
(11:01):
You know it's not James con So the negative space
there is doing something is just not leading you to
John Kessale exactly. It's like there is a there is
a silhouette, there is an outline, there is a shape there,
and you know what, you know that certain things are
not going to fit in that shape. Okay, speaking of
that guy. Actors, how about this one? Who's the actor
(11:22):
who played Nancy's dad in a Nightmare on Elm Street. Answer?
It was John Saxon, of course, the great John Saxon.
Now you submitted that question and answer, But do you
think it would have stumped you? If you hadn't, it
would not have stumped me. Um, this was very much
one unlike Oliver Read. I know John Saxson when I
(11:45):
see him, and like the John Saxson, I guess it's
just more of a singular name. It sticks out more,
whereas Oliver Read. Even though Oliver Read was very much
one of a kind, his name is a little. Uh,
I don't know. It's a little British e. I don't know. Yeah,
John Saxon to me, I think i'd know him, or
from Enter the Dragon, where he plays the most boring
of all the fighters. He does play the most boring
(12:06):
about the fighters. He doesn't even really fight all that hard.
Just kind of happens to be in the right place
at the right time, doesn't he John Saxon in a nutshell? Okay,
So back to William James. So we said William James
was the first person to really describe the sensation that
we know about, but he didn't call it tip of
the tongue phenomenon. The name, as far as we know,
just comes from regular language, right, that's colloquial usage. Yeah,
(12:31):
it's it's apparently a universal thing. Uh. In particular, we
were looking at the nineteen and nine paper Sparkling at
the End of the Tongue, the ideology of tip of
the tongue phenomenology, and what they did is they surveyed
fifty one language and they found that forty five of them.
So that's about expressed the feeling of temporary inaccessibility with
(12:53):
the same tongue metaphor. Here yeah, and so you might
see this in terms of having the word on your
top or at the back of your tongue or in
the mouth or in the throat or something. Uh. The
one that's in the title of that paper, sparkling at
the end of the tongue is I should say, it's
worth noting that that expression comes from Korean and that's
(13:15):
just pure wildfire. It's so good, sparkling at the end
of the tongue. Yeah. That that kind of draws back
to that that the description from James that it's wraith like,
you know, this is supernatural energy to it. Uh. Interestingly enough,
of the the languages surveyed here, American sign language, Icelandic
to sub Saharan African languages, and Indonesian do not use
(13:37):
the tongue metaphor. Now Additionally, five languages Cantonese, Mandarin, Hindijasa,
and Ebo use the related expression in the mouth to
describe the experience. The Japanese use the expression out of
the throat and uh, and some use multiple metaphors, so
(13:57):
you'll have the tongue, but then you have another one
in use as well, with the French being in my opinion,
the most exciting because they use both the tip of
the tongue and hole in my head. Yeah, it's like, oh,
it's it's like I almost have it, but there's a
hole in my head. And it's I guess the thought
like flew out that the word just flew out of
(14:17):
my head and I cannot grasp it. Oh, that adds
a whole new meaning to I need to think of
John Kazale like I need a hole in my head. Yeah,
it's it's it's interesting. Uh. And certainly one of those
where you you know, you start thinking of languages is
kind of like little ecosystems of symbolism and metaphor and
if you uh and and and some of those ideas
(14:38):
are universal, some of them are confined to a number
of ecosystems, and some seem to be just perfectly encapsulated
within that particular language. Yeah, totally. So we're gonna come
back to that paper in a minute, but I do
want to go back and mention that they're of a
(15:00):
landmark paper in the study of tip of the tongue
phenomenon that came in nineteen sixty six by Roger Brown
and David McNeil, And this was just called the tip
of the tongue phenomenon published in the Journal of Verbal
Learning and Verbal Behavior, and these guys made some of
the first systematic observations of what happens during a tip
of the tongue state in an experimental setting. They define
(15:21):
tip of the tongue is a failure to recall a
word of which one has knowledge, again bringing these distinctions
of sort of stages of knowledge into things. So what
does it mean when you think you remember something but
you can't bring it to mind. And one of the
things they point out at the outside of their paper
is that it's interesting, like, if you can't recall the word,
(15:44):
how do we know that the person experiencing a tip
of the tongue state a tot if you will, actually
has knowledge of the word. What if it's just an
illusion that you actually have knowledge of the word. And
they think that's not the case, because you can observe
a couple of things. One of the things is that
sometimes people resolve the tip of the tongue state by themselves.
So you might sit there for a minute going like, oh, oh, oh,
(16:07):
I know it, I know it, and then figure it
out and then so that sort of proves that you
did actually have it. It's not just a phenomenal illusion
that you would have access to the word. And then
there are other cases where the purpose where the person,
even if they don't resolve the state by themselves, they
can recognize the word once it's presented from the outside,
(16:27):
and they can negate other words. So even if you
couldn't come up with John Kazale, you could say no,
not that actor, not that actor. No, no, no, you
could say no to all the other names in the world.
Someone says John Cassavetti's and you you instantly no, it's no,
it's not John Cassavetti's. But that might be enough to say, oh,
it's John Kazale, right. And that's one of the other
things that's really interesting and study of the tip of
(16:48):
the tongue phenomenon is that certain clues related to the
sound of the word can trigger it. They can send
you down the right path. But I like this description
they give what the tip of the tongue state is like.
They say, the signs of it were unmistakable. He would
appear to be in mild torment, something like the brink
of a sneeze, and if he found the word, his
(17:09):
relief was considerable. I think we've we've all find ourselves
in a situation. I don't know I'm speaking for everybody here,
but I'll speak for myself. I have certainly found myself
in the situation where a a tot is induced in
my own mind, and in a conversation with several people.
Everyone else moves on to something a little more more
than just and I'm still in that tot, and so
(17:31):
everything's just going on around me. And then I resolved
the tot, and then I disturbed the conversation again by
saying I was don knots don Knots played Barney five
or whatever the top mind and nobody else knows what
you're talking about. Everybody else has totally forgotten this what
what has actually been just a situation of mental anguish
for me for you know, a few seconds anyway. Yeah, okay,
(17:53):
so I think we've we we sorted described the phenomenon. Now.
It's it's these two main features. Inability to recall a
word or phrase, and then the subjective sensation that recall
is imminent, it's inbound, you're just about to have it.
But one of the really interesting things about this subject
is thinking about what broader implications this has for how
(18:13):
we understand language working in the brain, Like how does
the retrieval of a word happen when you're putting together
the language you speak? Just consider this for a second.
Usually speaking happens so fast you don't have time to
analyze it. When you go to speak a sentence, where
do your words come from? One of the creepiest things
(18:36):
is how little awareness we really seem to have of
how language comes out of us. So I start speaking
a sentence, and the sentence happens, but I don't really
know how it happened. I'm not consciously aware of choosing
each and every one of the words I use from
some kind of dictionary in my brain as I go along. Uh,
it just sort of happens and then it's out, and
(18:57):
I don't know what happened in between. But it's only
really in that tip of the tongue state. By contrast,
that the mystery of the regular fluidity of language becomes
so clear and so starkly weird. And it is weird,
isn't it. Like I I can't help but think now
about the difference between um, my my my spoken use
(19:18):
of language and my written use of language and not
just in the fact, and you know, the obvious fact
that with written language one has the opportunity to revise
and uh and shift things around and tweak it until
you get it in the exact form you want. But
just my you know, by the moment, my real time
use of language, I feel is rather different in both
the spoken in the written form. Yeah, yeah, I think
(19:42):
that's totally true. And in fact, I think I have
more of the sensation of consciously dealing with something like
a mental dictionary when I'm writing than when I'm talking.
When I'm talking, it feels much more mysterious and obscure
to me where the words come from. Yeah, Like, when
I'm writing, then there's like a little guy in my
head and he's going into a little library and saying,
(20:04):
you know, I think we'll have this word and this
word and this word. These are the ones we're going
to use, Whereas when I'm speaking, it's more like a
scene from a like a submarine movie. We're like, all right,
let's get the torpedoes in there. We've got to go,
We've got to go. He has to somehow express what
he wants on his sandwich. Is that the right word?
I don't care get it out there, because these sandwiches
have to happen and the sentences out before you even
(20:26):
know what happened. And then you may have had some
Freudian slips. You mentioned weird body organs that you didn't
mean to why why I don't know the Freudian slip
and another area worthy of consideration for future episode. You know.
I feel like we really should come up with our
own proprietary expression for tip of the tongue states. I
don't know exactly what it should be. Maybe we'll think
(20:46):
about it by the end of the episode. But I
do want to mention that in there was a paper
we looked at that that had it was called a
Review of the Tip of the Tongue Experience in Psychological
Bulletin by Alan Us Brown. And this is just a
helpful way to quickly summarize some quick findings since that
nineteen sixties six paper that are on the table about
(21:08):
what what's the deal with tip of the tongue? Well,
what does science found out? They found that one, it's
a nearly universal experience. Pretty much everybody experiences it. Number two,
on average, it occurs about once a week for people.
I feel like that sounds kind of low. It does,
I think we I mean, we just triggered it like
at least half a dozen times for each of us
in this conversation. Maybe unusual in US because we spend
(21:30):
way more time talking about movies that are full of
barely recognizable actors that we feel like lots of forgettable names. Yeah. Um,
the number three they say it increases with age. Number four.
It's frequently elicited by proper names, so probably more often
than dictionary words. It's you're going to be searching for
who was that actor, who was that famous person because
(21:52):
these were these names are not necessarily part of your vocabulary,
and you're yeah, and it's it's I feel like it's
going to be more memorable than your tempt to use
a word or recognize a word that exists kind of
outside of your standard palette. Yeah. So fifth observation is
it often enables access to the target words first letter.
There's a really common experience you you're in a tip
(22:13):
of the tongue state. You can't remember the word, but
you can remember what it starts with. Yeah, Like I
don't remember what those really weird pyramid things are that
they had in the ancient world. But they began with
a Z what were they? What was it? And then
you remember zig zigaratte. Yeah, I'm sneaking Ziggy Stardust, Yeah
I wanted the too, Okay. Six These the tip of
the tongue states are often accompanied by words related to
(22:36):
the target. Again, you can come up with ziggy star dust,
but not zigguratte right, Or if it's you're trying to
remember that characters, that character actor's name, you'll remember every
film he was in and maybe some of the the
the characters that he played. Yeah, and then the final
thing is uh. The tip of the tongue states are
resolved during the experience about half of the time, so
it's it's only about half of the time that it's
(22:57):
just unresolved anguish. You just end in torture that fades
out and you get washed away into the sea of
experience and never find an end to your problem. Now
as well discussed though the our age of of smartphones
than just almost you know, constant internet connection. I feel
it has has has changed the scenario used to if
(23:19):
you couldn't think of of the of the name of
of an actor, like he just had to maybe go
home and look through your old film magazines or ask
around until somebody identified Fredo for you. But now you're
just a click away. So it just comes down to
like how long am I willing to suffer I find
myself in this very scenario. Like sometimes there's a sense
(23:40):
of pride, like I'm gonna remember this on my own.
I'm not going to go to the smartphone because I
should know who this actor is. It's it's much more
satisfying to do it without cheating, right and then, But
then other times you might be like, screw it. I
need I need to know. I don't care if I'm
driving a car. I need to know who played the
High Priest and beast Master. I have no idea. Here's
(24:00):
one where I'm not having Tip of the tongue. I
just I have no clue. He had a very uh
try to try to he had. He has a very
pronounced nose, a very hawk like nose in that film,
and not David Warner. He was in the sequel or
maybe the third one. Okay, No, I I just had
no idea. He really didn't know one tip of the tongue.
(24:22):
I completely outside my memory experience. Yeah, all right, well,
you know, shame on you for not remembering the priest.
But that's understandable. Okay, quick question. This is a toy
musical instrument that produces a buzzing tone when a person
hums into the mouth hole. Answer kazoo. No that one.
(24:45):
I think that would have stumped me a little bit.
Not that I don't know the word kazoo, but i'd
be I'd be like, wait, what what? What a toy?
I'd be thinking of something else. Anyway, Okay, here I
got another one for you. So what's the word for
a chemical having pH greater than seven? It's the opposite
of the word acidic, a synonym of the word basic.
(25:09):
You probably encountered this sometime in school. The word is alkaline.
A base is an alkaline. And this one, this one
threw me for a curve the other day. But though
I'm not completely sure of it was a full on
tot because I think I was trying to remember the
wrong word. Oh yeah, what was the word? I can't remember?
Because now all I can remember his his alkaline. Okay,
(25:29):
well we should look at these explanatory theories. What's going
on when you're having a tot in your brain? And
here a big help is one of the papers we
mentioned earlier, that paper Sparkling at the End of the
Tongue the Ideology of the Tip of the Tongue phenomenology.
Horrible name, but very clear, laying out of a bunch
of the different theories that have been put forward over
the years in explaining how tip of the tongue states
(25:53):
could be coming about. And there all the explanatory theories
are are mostly grouped under two your ferent umbrella terms. Right,
that's right, So we basically have direct access views and
inferential views. Okay, let's start with direct access views. Just
as an overall, direct access views argue that tots arise
(26:14):
from sensitivity to the unretrieved target. So, in other words,
the memory item in question isn't strong enough for you
to recall it, but there's still strong enough to signal
a TOT. So I like to think of this in
terms of a murder is taken place because there's a
mystery here, right, there's a problem to be solved. And
this is like the witness saying, look, Officer, I glimpse
the murderer and the shadows, but I couldn't quite make
(26:37):
them out. I can almost name a suspect. Yeah, I
think this one, I'm gonna have a little metaphor here.
We'll see how it works out. But if I understand
this view correctly, I think these are the types of
explanations where it's like you have the starting point and
you have the ending point, but you're just failing to
make a connection between them, as opposed to this other
(26:58):
type of view. We're going to talk about the inferential view,
and now what's the deal with that. Inferential views claim
that tots are not based directly on an inaccessible but
activated targets. In other words, tots arise from clues. Okay,
so this would be like the detective saying I didn't
see the murderer. I wasn't there, but based on the evidence,
(27:18):
I can almost name a suspect. Okay, So in my
other analogy, if the first one was I have the
start point, to have the endpoint, and I just can't
quite connect them, this would be more like I have
the start point and I think I can find my
way to an ending point. Yeah. Like it's kind of
like if you were faced with the John Cassale situation.
My understanding of this would be like, maybe I don't
(27:39):
actually remember John Cassale's name. But I've seen enough of
his pictures I can and I and I know his face,
I know his roles. I should be able to like
I have. Surely, surely I am the type of person
who knows John Casale's name. Yeah, I can put it together.
And in this case, I think, Uh, the feeling of
knowing the word that you experience is uh, it's not
(28:00):
based on the word being activated in memory, but your
brain is subconsciously judging that it has enough information to
circuitously figure out the word. If you'll, if you'll just
give me a moment, if you know, you just have
a second. Um. So it's not the presence of the
word itself that's exciting you, but it's your unconscious confidence
in your own lexical detective powers to pick up on
(28:21):
your detective metaphor. Indeed, alright, so at this point, let's
break them out a little a little further here. Okay,
so under these direct access views, Okay, we've got a
few different, uh, different ones explained in this paper. Yeah.
Basically they center on three, um, three sub hypotheses. There's
(28:41):
the blocking hypothesis. Blocking hypothesis says that toughts occur when
a retrieval cue prompts retrieval of an incorrect but closely
related word, and we realize it's incorrect, thus the blank.
So it's like you're trying to remember John Casale's name,
you remember somebody else's name. You're like, no, that's not it.
The blank makes itself now. It's like if your Google
(29:04):
Maps is constantly telling you over and over to go
to the wrong destination. You keep going there, but you
every time you recognize it's wrong, so you just back
up and start over, so you never go anywhere. It's
kind of like I like, I, I've basically said this
sentence before it with different words. But it's if I'm
trying to remember all of a Read and I say,
I want to say Rex Harrison, but I know that's wrong,
(29:24):
you know, like I I know the thing that's coming
to mind is definitely not it. Yeah, but I can't
remember Oliver Read's name. You have a path blaze through
the woods of your memory that's taking you to the
wrong destination, but it's just too well forged. You can't
stop following it, alright. The next one is the incomplete
activation hypothesis. This holds that Taught's happen when we can't
(29:47):
recall the target word, but since its presence nonetheless. Okay,
so this sounds just like the basic failure hypothesis, the
failure to connect. You really do have the word in memory,
but you just can't quite get there for some reason,
some some strength of connection does not exist. Yeah, maybe
you're you're you're a little tired, you're worn out. Everything
is not really firing at maximum speed, and you just
(30:10):
can't reach it. What's the next one? Transmission deficit model? Okay,
this says that tats arise from a multi component memory representation.
You retrieve the image, the semantic meaning of the thing,
(30:31):
but not the word. So maybe the sound, even the smell,
but not the word. Oh, you mean, like the semantics
associated with the concept of the word. But what you're
searching for is the sound of the word, and you
can't do that exactly. So those are the three main
direct access views. Okay, those are those are the I
saw I saw the killer in the shadows, but now
I can't exactly remember his face, right, But what's the
(30:54):
what are the detective views? The inferential views? All right,
there are two main ones here. The first one is
Q familiar charity theory, and this holds that toughts are
based on an assessment of the level of recognition of
a particular cue or question. What does that mean? You
don't have to actually have the memory items stored away.
But and this is my read on this one, is
that you feel like you should know it. So this
(31:15):
is more directly related to what I said earlier about
inferential views, like I feel like I'm the type of
person who should know that, and I believe that strongly
enough that I'm straining to remember it. Okay, But it
seems like, just from my uh naive viewpoint, maybe it
seems like that one would have a harder time explaining
those cases where you have a tought, you feel like
(31:36):
you're about to remember something, and then you do remember it. Yeah,
It's like this one was harder for me to like,
it's harder for me to to read this one and
then think back and try and feel like and recognize
it in my own experience. I feel like the best
I can come up with is maybe like trying to
remember state capitals of states that I don't think about anymore.
(32:00):
Because there's definitely a point in everybody's hister whe had
to memorize all the states and their capitals, or various
other things like memorizing the periodic table, or memorizing, you know,
all the nations of Africa. That kind of thing, the
kind of thing you end up not carrying around with it,
but at some point you knew it, and you know
that you knew it, even if you don't actually remember
it anymore. Oh, but maybe you're thinking you can piece
it together from other pieces of information in your brain
(32:22):
that are more readily accessible, Like maybe you can remember
the state capitals if you can picture a map in
your head. Yeah, or think of the sports teams that
are associated with it. I don't know, Okay, that that
makes more sense. And then there's one more explanation under
the inferential umbrella, right yes. Accessibility heuristic tots are based
(32:45):
on the amount and intensity of partial information that remembers
retrieve when they cannot recall a target answer, So I
remember everything but her name. I should be able to
remember her name. That's that's my I read on this.
So so you do friends between a TOT and just
not knowing something is is how much other stuff peripheral
(33:06):
to this word you remember, especially if it's really intense
like I can remember what her hair smells like I can,
or I can remember, you know, staring into his nostril
holes and seeing the hairs there. Why can't I remember
his name? Why is this so intense and yet the
name alludes me? I should know this person. I was
trapped in a cave with them for three weeks. We
(33:28):
had to do unspeakable things to survive. Why can't I
remember his first name? That sort of thing? Now, the
reason you couldn't remember his first name is because you
know what he did to you. He made a bar
hole in your skull to suppose a small part of
your brain. But what's the word for that process when
you drill a little hole in somebody's skull. Well, your answer,
(33:52):
of course is prepanation in or trepanning. Yeah, or if
you're a modern neurosurgeon, you might call it craniotomy smarty pants,
But we're we're referring to the Stone Age practice personally here.
That's a good one, because it's a word that I
bet a lot of people have heard at some point,
but you don't use it all that often unless you're us. Yeah, yeah,
it's come up without quite a bit here, But and
(34:14):
it certainly our listeners may have it stored away as well,
but otherwise it didn't come up in the real world
too often. Okay, So, as we've mentioned, there are a
bunch of different theories that have been proposed over the
years as to how you might explain different versions of
the tip of the tongue state. But the real question,
of course, I know people people want the answer to
is how do you overcome it? Or maybe just how
(34:35):
do you avoid making it worse? Because it truly can
feel like agony. It's a petty agony, but it's agony nonetheless. Okay,
never fear. We do actually have some news for you
on on how to affect your tip of the tongue
recurrent states, but it might not all be good news.
Uh So, so let's start with some particularly bad news. Robert,
(34:55):
did you know that the more time you spend in
the tip of the tongue state, the less likely you
are to remember the word the next time. This is
crazy because it makes because it's easy to fall into
that thinking where I don't want to grab my smartphone,
I'm want to think of think of this up myself,
even if it takes me. You know, the better part
of an hour, I'm going to reach it myself. It
feels like that should strengthen the muscle, right. Well, I
(35:18):
mean there might be something to that, as we're going
to see from a study in in just a second.
But how many times does that process lead to correct
resolution of the tip of the tongue of state? A
lot of times you just failed, don't you? Well, I
don't fail, not with you end up cheating. Well, that's
the thing. I either end up cheating eventually. But I
(35:39):
feel like if I apply my mind to it long enough,
I get there with actors names, because that's my sickness.
But but yeah, I can't think of a single situation
where I've said, well, I just can't think of who
played Who was Danny's mom in Kubricks the Shining Oh
(36:01):
she also was she also Olive Oil and the Robert
Altman Popeye movie. Yes, yes, she was great. But yeah, Okay.
So there's a study from two eight by a scientists
Amy Beth Warrener and Karen Are Humphreys called learning to
(36:22):
Fail Reoccurring Tip of the tongue states you can already
tell from the title that this is going to bring
some bad news for people who have this petti agony
of the tip of the tongue journey. Um. So, the
hypothesis going into this experiment was that if you make
an error once, you're more likely to make it again
by way of what they call a quote implicit learning mechanism.
(36:44):
The more you fail, you the better you forge that
path to failure. If you go with the metaphor we
had earlier about blazing a trail through the woods, every
time you walk down the wrong path to the wrong destination,
that path just gets better and better to find. You.
You're more brush out of the way, you make footprints,
you you trample down, and and it just becomes easier
(37:05):
and easier to find your way to failure every time.
So how did this study work? They played a definition
game kind of like the one we've been playing, where
they read you a definition of a of a low
frequency word, what's the word? And when a subject entered
a t ot state, they were randomly given a delay
of either ten seconds or thirty seconds to recall the word,
(37:27):
and then after the delay period, the experiment or would
give them the words. So, if you're looking for sarcophagus,
you can't get it for either ten seconds or thirty
seconds at random. They then give you the words sarcophagus,
oh okay, And two days later the participants came back
to the lab to be tested again on the same words,
(37:48):
and some participants got stuck on the same words they've
been stuck on just two days before. And strangely, the
results of the test showed that tip of the tongue
states were twice as likely to happen on words where
the subject spent thirty seconds in the tip of the
tongue state than in words where they spent ten seconds
in the tip of the tongue state. So the longer
(38:09):
you spent in that state of saying I know this,
I know this, but not being able to call it up,
the worse you got at remembering the word in the future.
And in the words of the authors quote, we argue
that this longer delay in h t ot state amounts
to a greater implicit learning of the erroneous state. You're
(38:29):
just practicing how to get worse and I uh, you know.
One of the interesting questions I was thinking about was
what to do with this information in a general sense,
because I do certainly believe that you can practice yourself
to get worse at something. I know a lot of
people have a kind of, um, very broadly practiced positive mindset.
(38:52):
I know I encountered this in writing workshops, where it
was just sort of the idea that there's no such
thing as bad practice. The more you write, the better
you're to get. And I do generally, of course, think
practice makes people better at almost any craft or skill,
but not all practice is good. I I am personally
of the opinion that you can right yourself into a
(39:12):
rut that makes you a worse writer the more you
do it well. One one way that I was thinking
about this earlier is in terms of of doing yoga. Um,
that's something I can relate to since I practice yoga.
But yeah, you can practice yoga every day, you can
go to a yoga class every day. But if you're
being instructed to do a pose in a way that
(39:35):
is incorrect or is in some way like long term
detrimental to you, Like you know, something where you're putting
too much pressure on your knee or you're bracing yourself
against your knee in a weird way, Um, yeah, you
can practice something the wrong way and and ultimately make
things worse. Yeah, in a way that you're you're not
just being unproductive, but you're literally backtracking your your things
(39:57):
are getting worse for you. I And so there's a
follow up to this though, that does have an interesting
tip we can take away. One of the authors of
this original study, Karen Humphreys, co authored another study that
came out just last year in with Maria C. D'Angelo,
and it was called Tip of the Tongue states reoccur
(40:17):
because of implicit learning, but resolving them helps. So they're
building on this previous research that said that speakers tend
to exhibit taught states for the same words over and over.
And they played this same game again, the definition game.
I'll read you a definition, you give me the low
frequency word, and they actually carried out six different experiments
(40:38):
in the study. They found a range of things. One
of them that they just replicated earlier findings about the
error state making things worse. What we were just talking about,
you can practice how to fail and get better at failing. Um,
you sit there in the taught state and you're just
getting worse and worse at remembering the word. But they
also found that subjects could decrease their likelihood of experiencing
(41:01):
this taught state on a single word in the future
if they were able to resolve the taught state on
their own, as opposed to not resolving it or having
the words supplied by a third party. So, right, so
if you can figure out a way to to find
that word from from your own mind without cheating, you
are less likely to have the taught state for that
(41:24):
word in the future. But then again, I mean, that's
kind of not very helpful advice, is it, Like, just
be told you must solve this problem in order to
not continue having this problem. It certainly makes tots uh
when you experience them, feel more like a ticking time bomb,
right right, But it it sounds though like the the
ideal situation here is you need to make sure that
(41:44):
you and your your immediate circle of you know, family
or friends are in a position to where you're they're
going to help you get it yourself exactly, because fortunately
they did find that this works. They figured out this
way that the experiment or can help without an gating
the corrective effect of self resolution. So you just give
(42:05):
hints that that's the way to resolve the taught state.
If the experiment or gives what they called orthographic cues,
so basically cues related to like the spelling of the word.
This would allow people to correct the bad retrieval pathway themselves,
and the authors conclude quote, these findings reinforce the notion
that the language production system is dynamic and continually learning
(42:27):
from experience, even when that experience is error full. Okay,
well let me try one out on everybody to to
to experiment with this. Who played the secretary in Ghostbusters?
All right? Can you think of it? If you can't,
let's not just give away the answer. What are some hints?
(42:48):
All right? What word? Letter does it start with? First name,
begins with A, last name begins with P. Last name
sounds like something you might boil water? In answer, Annie Potts,
Oh there you go. So hopefully that was less damaging
(43:09):
to your brain because we we we supplied a few
hints along the way so that you could still get
it yourself, unless we got there before you were you
were able to say it yourself, in which case I'm sorry.
We've condemned you to possible future taughts with anything. We
should have asked you to posit, But then again, we
didn't want to spend too long on a data Yeah, Okay,
So it may seem like there's essentially an ascending order
(43:30):
of preference if you want to avoid future taught states.
So it sounds like the worst case is probably just
sitting in the taught state and never resolving it. You
don't want to do that. Better but still not great
is looking up the answer, better but still not The
best is looking up the answer very quickly, as quickly
as you can, so spend as little time as possible
(43:50):
in that taught state. But if you're on your own,
you know, unless you want to call a friend, that's
the best thing to do, right And then, so the
best option seems like, uh, figuring out the name for
yourself and if necessary, getting hints from people around you
that have to do with like what letter it starts
with or what it sounds like. This would be something
worthwhile in future versions of Siri, Right, so that series
(44:14):
not just answering your question, but series providing you a
hint so that you can get it yourself quickly. Interesting,
or maybe that would just be about being able to
ask a specific question like Sirie, what is the first
letter in the first name of the secretary? And Ghostbusters?
Oh man, if I would I shell out for an
unlocked iPhone. If I could just get Sirie to do
(44:35):
that maybe maybe. Now, are there any other any other
clear answers on ways to avoid taught states? I don't
know if we found any other clear ones. Some confused ones. Yeah,
like the coffee thing is confusing. Um, like maybe drink
coffee or maybe not. It depends on where you look. Uh.
(44:55):
Where we were looking at two thousand fourteen paper caffeine
priming in the tip of the tongue evidence for plasticity
in the phonological system, and I found that caffeine can
both increase and decrease the number of tots depending on
the experiment. This study found that caffeine might hinder your
short term recall of certain words, while past studies have
(45:17):
have illustrated the caffeine can perhaps help prevent tots. So
maybe we shouldn't use tots here because everybody wants to
increase their number of tots. We should say to the
tongue states, yeah, well you know, I like tots. It
goes back to childhood when you're in the lunch line
at school. Who doesn't wish you had more toughts? So
they only give you like seven. It's horrible. Well, the
(45:38):
thing is, now I am going to discuss them as tats.
So when I'm trying to think of someone's name, now
among you know what I'm hanging out with people, I'm
gonna start saying I'm having a tot. Here, I'm having
a tot, and I can have no clue what I'm
talking about. Right. Another way to involve drugs, if you
might want to avoid tots in a in a cheating,
roundabout way, UH is taking some thing like LaRaza pam.
(46:01):
But now we're not advising you take Larazo pam recreationally
or even to improve performance, because it doesn't actually improve performance.
It's not going to help you avoid tots in that
it will help you claim the word earlier. It may
help you avoid tots in that you'll be wrong and
you won't care. You're not going to experience that. This
(46:21):
is what they found is that when people are on
this drug and they get the word wrong, they don't
have this sense of I know it, it's imminent. They
just say, whatever retrieves you say. Uh. Rex Harrison played
The Secretary and Ghostbusters and they never had all right,
(46:41):
let's have another one, Joe, what do you got Okay,
how about this one. What's the time and date? Happens
twice each year where the sun crosses over the celestial
equator where the night and the day are the same length.
Answer acts, No, it's equinox galax. Escalax, of course, is
(47:01):
uh a medication that you take when you can't poop, right,
escal acis escalax a mythical creature, and escalax escalax is
a mythical creature that you summon when you can't put
It has the magical ability to help you. Pip. I
think the escalax comes from the Simpsons. It's a it's
a horse with the head of a rabbit and the
(47:22):
body of a rabbit. Okay, I was not familiar with
that one. That's a good one. Okay. One more fact
I wanted to talk about before we wrap up, which
I did think was kind of interesting, and that's simply
the fact that there is an equivalent phenomenon. Now, you
said that the earlier study found that there wasn't a
tip of the tongue expression in American sign language, but
(47:43):
there is a recognized tip of the fingers phenomenon deaf signers.
And I think this is really interesting because when I'm
thinking about what's going on in the tip of the
tongue phenomenon. There seems to be a disconnect between the semantics.
You have the semantics, you know what the word means,
or you know what the actor's face looks like, or
what movies he or she was in or something like that.
(48:06):
You know, you have all the meaning information, you just
can't connect it to the word, to the sounds of
the words. There's a disconnect between semantics and phonology. But
in in in sign language, you're not necessarily involving sounds. There,
you might be involving hand motions and and different types
of where the hands are placed, what you do with
(48:27):
your fingers, the movement involved in the hand motions to
gesture the name, and so there have been observations and
studies about this tip of the fingers phenomenon, and I
just thought that that was a very interesting parallel. It
seems like the tip of whatever doesn't necessarily have to
be sound. Yeah, that's interesting. It takes the same mental
(48:48):
process outside of the sonic realm. Yeah. Like one of
the things observed about it is that signers were often
able to recall the first letter of a finger spelled
word isn't that interesting the same way that you can
usually you know, you can think, oh, any pots, Well
you can't think of any pots, but I know her
name started with an A. People who who deaf signers
(49:11):
can do the same thing it started with and then
the hand sign for an A. Interesting that there's a
whole study about this, if you want to look at up.
It's called Tip of the Fingers Experiences by Deaf Signers,
Insights into the Organization of a sign based Lexicon and
Psychological Science in two thousand five. Anyway, I find this
topic really interesting, not just because of the phenomenon, but
(49:33):
because of what I brought up at the in the
earlier section about how it highlights weird things about the
nature of language that we don't usually think about, like
the One of the things is what people talk about
in semiotics, you know, the difference between the signifier and
the signified that we just often don't recognize that gap
in between them, like the gap William James talks about there,
(49:55):
uh that we can so easily come to identify a
word with the thing it means, but the word is
not the thing, and these these gaps where we have
the object in mind, we have the face in mind,
but we can't make the sounds to make it. Highlights
some of the weird mechanical nature of meaning and its
(50:15):
relationship to science in our universe. Yeah, it's like when
the machine is working, we don't think twice about it
because we are we are the machine. But but when
when When there are catastrophic errors, that's one thing. But
these are every day, or at least according to the
study we're looking at, at least every week. We experience
these errors, and it provides us just a little insight
(50:36):
into what's going on. I think these errors can bring
up interesting facts about our brain in the same way
that seeing glitches in a computer game can make you
understand a lot more about programming and how the game works,
because you might be say you're playing a computer game
in some kind of three D rendered world, and you're
just having it as a pure experience. You're in the world,
(50:57):
you know, it's all real, and your characters real. Being
in the world is real, and suddenly a glitch starts happening.
You run through a wall or something, or part of
your you know, your arm comes off and floats free
or something, and it suddenly snaps you back into the
reality that that none of this is a true, organic,
real experience. But it's all bits, you know, objects and
(51:18):
bits of code that are functioning together perfectly well most
of the time. But suddenly you understand what all the
different bits and shapes are and how they're made, and
how they have to come together to create this seamless experience. Yeah,
there's always something, there's something kind of magical about, Like
the first time you walk through a wall and doom
and you're standing in the sort of that the ether
(51:41):
outside of the of the game and you but you
can look down and see those hallways just floating into nothing. Yeah.
And then of course up above there's the face of
John Kazee looking over all of us. Indeed, along with
any pots and don knots, a complete pantheon of of
(52:02):
taught actors. Okay, that's all I got. You got anything else?
That's all I got? Um, Hey, but I know that
everyone out there has some experience with this. What's the
word that always sets you off? Yeah? What's that that
one actor that never comes to mind when you try
and imagine, try and try and remember their names. We'd
love to hear from you on all of that. In
(52:23):
the meantime, check out stuff Toble your Mind dot com.
That's where you'll find oh podcast episodes, videos. We have
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(52:44):
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or if you want to let us know that thing,
that thing that always sets you off, you just know it,
it's just there. I'm just about to get it, but
(53:05):
you can't quite get it. You can email us and
you may just have to describe what it is because
you can't come up with the word at blow the
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(53:27):
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