Tip of the Tongue

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 and Joe as they discuss the science of TOT phenomenon and what you can do to prevent it.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from housetop works
dot com. Hey wasn't a stop to blow your mind.
My name is Robert Lamb 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

(00:24):
a necessarily a meat reco question. Right, are 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. Answer sarcophagus. Okay, a lot

(00:47):
of you listeners probably knew that word. It does come
up quite a bit. I mean, 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. Okay. Some

(01:07):
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

(01:30):
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

(01:53):
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 reading about tots, about tots. We
we will be talking about tots a good bit today.
But if you were stuck looking for the word even

(02:14):
momentarily if 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

(02:36):
you 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

(02:56):
sounds kind of like sarcophagus within going no, no, that's
not the word. Here, we're going to do another one
so you can have a chance to think about it again.
This time we're going to do a proper name. 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 one any

(03:17):
not much. 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,

(03:43):
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
appreciate especially you know, the critically acclaimed American cinema have

(04:05):
encountered his name at some point. Yeah, you would know it.
You would 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, Yeah, he he died young,
but he was a character actor. If he's been a
leading man and he died at his age, we'd have
him on T shirts everywhere. But no, he was a

(04:27):
character actor 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 of you 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

(04:47):
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 with Joe this week,
but previously, Oliver Reid will come up a lot, like
I'll try and remember who's that actor who played that role.

(05:08):
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 plays
Bill Sikes in a movie adaptation of Oliver, you know
that would that would make sense. He's been He's been
in so many things because I think his last film
was Gladiator, wonderful actor, did some great movies, did some

(05:29):
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

(05:49):
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 should know and you're just about to get it. Yeah.

(06:09):
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,

(06:31):
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

(06:51):
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

(07:11):
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 the semi area. You know that they're

(07:32):
the kind of actor who always plays a cop. 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 see. 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,

(07:52):
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

(08:16):
be familiar with him from the Varieties of Religious Experience,
great text in the History of 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 they if not, I like the idea of exploring
it as like a red con buddy picture. You know.

(08:38):
But so 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

(08:58):
mere gap. 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

(09:20):
immediately so 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

(09:43):
knowledge 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 the other path when you know that
it's not this other word. You know, right when you're
looking for John Cazale, you know it's not Al Pacino

(10:05):
you're looking for. You know it's not James con So
the negative space there is doing something. It's just not
leading you to John Kasale 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

(10:27):
the actor who played Nancy's dad in a Nightmare on
Elm Street? Answer? Who's 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

(10:50):
I 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 Reid was very much
one of a kind, he 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 better
from Enter the Dragon, where he plays the most boring
of all the fighters. He does play the most boring

(11:12):
about the fighter thing. He doesn't even really fight all
that hard. It just kind of happens to be in
the right place at the right time, doesn't it. 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,

(11:34):
that's colloquial usage. Yeah, it's It's apparently a universal thing. Uh.
In particular, we were looking at the nineteen and ninety
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 it's about expressed the

(11:55):
feeling of temporary inaccessibility with the same tongue metaphor here. Yeah,
and so you might see this in terms of having
the word on your tongue 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

(12:16):
I should say, it's worth noting that that expression comes
from Korean and that's 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. Interestingly, enough, of the the languages surveyed here,
American Sign language, Icelandic to sub Saharan African languages, and

(12:41):
Indonesian do not use 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

(13:03):
you 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

(13:23):
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

(13:44):
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 there's sort of
a landmark paper in the study of tip of the
tongue phenomenon that came in nineteen sixty six by Roger

(14:05):
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 tip of the tongue is a failure to recall
a word of which one has knowledge, again bringing these

(14:28):
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, how do we know that the person experiencing
a tip of the tongue state a tot if you will,

(14:48):
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, I know it, I know it,
and then figure it out and then so that sort

(15:10):
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, and they can negate other words.
So even if you couldn't come up with John Kazale,

(15:31):
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 is 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 the tongue phenomenon is that
certain clues related to the sound of the word can

(15:52):
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 relief was considerable. I
think we've we've all found ourselves in a situation. I

(16:14):
don't know I'm speaking for everybody here, but speak for myself.
I have certainly found myself in a 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 and more just, and I'm still
in that tot, and so everything's just going on around me.
And then I resolved the tot, and then I disturbed

(16:35):
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, so I think we've we
we sort of described the phenomenon. Now. It's it's these

(16:56):
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 we understand language working
in the brain, Like, how does the retrieval of a

(17:18):
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 is how little awareness we
really seem to have of how language comes out of us.

(17:41):
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 I don't know what
happened in between. But it's only really in that tip

(18:01):
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 of language and my
written use of language, and not just in the fact,
and you know, the obvious fact that with written language

(18:23):
one has the opportunity to revise and uh and shift
things around and tweak it until you get in an
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 that's totally true. And in fact, I think

(18:43):
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, there's like a little guy in my
head and he's going into a little library and saying,

(19:04):
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. But 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

(19:25):
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, 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 about it

(19:46):
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 sp Around, And this is just a helpful way
to quickly summarize some quick findings since that nineteen sixty
six paper that are on the table about what what's

(20:09):
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 we when
we just triggered it, like at least half a dozen
times for each of us in It may be unusual
in US because we spend way more time talking about

(20:31):
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. The number four,
it's frequently elicited by proper names. It's 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?

(20:52):
Because these were these names are not necessarily part of
your vocabulary and your Yeah, and it's it's I feel
like it's going to be more memorable than your attempting
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

(21:13):
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 zigguratt, Yeah, ziggy star dust, Yeah, I wanted
the too, Okay. Six These the tip of the tongue

(21:33):
states are often accompanied by words related to the target. Again,
you can come up with ziggy star dust, but not
ziggaratte 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 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

(21:54):
of the time, so it's it's only about half of
the time that it's 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 our age
of of smartphones and just almost you know, constant internet connection.

(22:16):
I feel it has has has changed the scenario used
to if you couldn't think of of the of the
name of of an actor, like you 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

(22:39):
a sense 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 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.
See here's one where I'm not having tip of the tongue.

(23:01):
I just I have no clue. He had a very
uh try to trying to He had his very pronounced nose,
very hawk like nose in that film, and not David Warner.
He was in the sequel or maybe the third one ripped. Okay, No,
I I just had no idea he really didn't know
one tip of the tongue. I completely outside my memory experience. Yeah,

(23:24):
all right, well, you know, shame on you for not
for not remembering the priest. But let'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, kazoo.
No that one. I think that would have stumped to

(23:46):
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 a p H greater than seven.
It's the opposite of the word acidic, a synonym of
the word basic. You probably encountered this sometime in school.

(24:10):
The word is alkaline. 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, well we should look at these explanatory theories.

(24:31):
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 papers 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 have been put forward over
the years in explaining how tip of the tongue states

(24:53):
could be coming about. And there all the explanatory theories
are are mostly grouped under two different umbrella terms. Right,
that's right, So we basically have direct access views and
inferential views. Okay, we'll start with direct access views. This
as an overall. Direct access views argue that tots arise

(25:14):
from sensitivity to the unretrieved targets. 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 has 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 glimpsed
the murderer and the shadows, but I couldn't quite make

(25:36):
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

(25:58):
type of view. We're going to talk about the wrenchial 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,

(26:18):
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

(26:39):
actually remember John Cassale's name, but I've seen enough of
his pictures I can and I and I know his face,
and 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,

(26:59):
it's not based on the word being activated in memory,
but your brains 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

(27:20):
on 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, we've got a few different, uh,
different ones explained in this paper yeah. Basically, they center
on three three sub hypotheses. There's the blocking hypothesis. Blocking

(27:43):
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 known.
It's like if your Google Maps is constantly telling you

(28:05):
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
basically said this sentence before it with different words. But
it's if I'm trying to remember Oliver Read and I say,
I want to say Rex Harrison, but I know that's wrong,
you know, like I, I I know the thing that's coming

(28:26):
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, all right. The next one is the
incomplete activation hypothesis. This holds that taught's happen when we

(28:47):
can't 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

(29:07):
is not really firing at maximum speed, and you just
can't reach it. Okay, what's the next one? Transmission deficit model. Okay,
this says that tots arise from a multi component memory representation.
You retrieve the image, the semantic meaning of the thing,
but not the word. So maybe the sound, even the smell,

(29:27):
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
what are the detective views the inferential views? All right?

(29:50):
There are two main ones here. The first one is
Q familiarity theory. This holds that tots are based on
an assessment of the level of recognition of a particular
cue or uestion. 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 is more
directly related to what I said earlier about inferential views,

(30:12):
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 taught you feel like you're about
to remember something, and then you do remember it. Yeah,

(30:34):
It's like this 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 I 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,
because there's definitely a point in everybody's history where had

(30:55):
to memorize all the states and their capitals, or various
other things like memorizing the pre to table, or memorizing,
you know, all the nations of Africa, that kind of thing.
So 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 that are more readily accessible, Like maybe you

(31:18):
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 on the amount and intensity of partial information

(31:42):
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 you the difference between a tot and
just not knowing something is? Is how much other stuff
peripheral to this word you remember? Especially if it's really intent.

(32:02):
It's like I can remember what her hair smells like.
I don't, 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 eludes me? I should know this person.
I was trapped in a cave with them for three weeks.
We had to do unspeakable things to survive. Why can't

(32:24):
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, do you? He he made
a burr hole in your skull, spose 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,

(32:45):
your answer, of course, it 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

(33:05):
without quite a bit here, but and 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

(33:26):
overcome it? Or maybe just how do you avoid making
it worse? Because it truly can't 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, did

(33:49):
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 all into that
thinking where I don't want to grab my smartphone. I
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 mean

(34:12):
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,
you end up cheating. Well, that's the thing. I either
end up cheating eventually. But I feel like if I

(34:33):
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 Kubrick's The Shining Oh was she also Olive Oil?

(34:59):
And the Robert Altman Popeye movie? Yes? She was great?
But yeah, Okay, So there's a study from two eight
by scientists Amy Beth Warrener and Karen are Humphreys called
learning to fail reoccurring tip of the tongue states you
can already tell from the title that this is going

(35:20):
to bring some bad news for people who have this
petti agony of the tip of the tongue of 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. The more you fail, you the better you
forge that path to failure. If you go with the

(35:43):
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 crear more brush out of the way, you make footprints,
you you trample down, and and it just becomes easier
and easier to find find your way to failure every time.
So how did this study work? They played a definition

(36:05):
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,
and then after the delay period the experiment or would
give them the words. So if you're looking for sarcophagus,

(36:26):
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,
and some participants got stuck on the same words they'd
been stuck on just two days before. And strangely, the

(36:48):
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 then in words where they spent ten cons
in the tip of the tongue state. So the longer
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.

(37:12):
And in the words of the author's quote, we argue
that this longer delay in t ot state amounts to
a greater implicit learning of the erroneous state. You're 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,

(37:32):
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.
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

(37:53):
you're going 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
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,

(38:16):
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
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

(38:36):
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
are getting worse for you. I agree. And so there's
a follow up to this though, that does have an
interesting tip we can take away. One of the authors

(38:59):
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
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.

(39:22):
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
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,

(39:45):
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
this taught state on a single word in the future
if they were able to resolve 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

(40:08):
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 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

(40:28):
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 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

(40:51):
the experiment or can help without negating the corrective effect
of self resolution. So you just give 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

(41:13):
the authors conclude quote, these findings reinforce the notion that
the language production system is dynamic and continually learning 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?

(41:36):
Can you think of it? If you can't, let's not
just give away the answer. What are some hints? All right?
What word? Let her? 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? Any potts? Oh,

(41:58):
there you go. So hopefully that was less damaging 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
condemned you to possible future taughts with anything, we should
have asked you to posit, but then again, we didn't

(42:18):
want you to spend too long on a data Yeah. Okay,
so it may seem like there's essentially an ascending order
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

(42:41):
as you can, so you spend as little time as
possible 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

(43:04):
in future versions of Siri. Right, so that series 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?

(43:27):
If I could just get Sirie to do 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. There are 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.

(43:49):
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

(44:10):
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 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 tots?
They only give you like seven, it's horrible. Well, the

(44:31):
thing is, now I am going to discuss them as tots.
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 something like LaRaza pam. But

(44:56):
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
what 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 is what they found is that when people are

(45:17):
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. But just say uh. Rex
Harrison played The Secretary and Ghostbusters, and they never all, Right,
what's have another one? Joe? What do you got? Okay?
How about this one? What's the time and date? Happens

(45:39):
twice each year where the sun crosses over the celestial equator,
where the night and the day are the same length?
Answer Esk will acts, No, it's equinox. Escalax of course,
is uh a medication that you take when you can't poop, right, Esk?

(46:00):
Aal ax, Escalax a mythical creature, and escalax and a
scalax is a mythical creature that you summon when you
can't pick, and has the magical ability to help you pick.
I think the escalax comes from the Simpsons. It's a
it's a horse with the head of a rabbit and
the body of a rabbit. Okay, I was not familiar
with that one. That's a good one. Okay. One more

(46:22):
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 there is a recognized tip of the fingers phenomenon
deaf signers. And I think this is really interesting because

(46:44):
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. 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

(47:07):
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 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

(47:29):
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 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

(47:51):
a finger spelled word. Isn't that interesting the same way
that you can usually you know, you 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 can do the same thing it started
with and then the hand sign for an a. Interesting.
There's a whole study about this the if you want

(48:12):
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 because of what I brought up at
the in the earlier section about how it highlights weird

(48:32):
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 uh that that we can so
easily come to identify a word with the thing it means,

(48:54):
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 relationship to signs 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.

(49:17):
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 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

(49:38):
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, you know it's all real, and your
characters are real. Being in the world is real, and
suddenly a glitch starts happening, you run through a wall
or something, or part your you know, your arm comes

(50:01):
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 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

(50:23):
to create the 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 know that the ether 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

(50:45):
Kazee looking over all of us. Indeed, along with any
pots and don knots, a complete pantheon of of taught actors. Okay,
that's all I got. You got anything else? That all
I got? Um? Hey, but I know that everyone out
there has some experience with this. What's the word that

(51:06):
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 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 existing audio episodes.

(51:30):
There's one up on ants. We have one coming up
soon on Trepid Nation. Go check that out. Also, we
have blog posts there leans out to our social media
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on both of those. We are stuff to blow your
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And if you want to get in touch with us
with feedback about this episode or any other recent episodes,

(51:52):
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
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 Doctor for more on this and

(52:19):
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