It turns out that this "tip of the tongue" phenomenon has a name: lethologica. Psychologists define the feeling as a feeling that accompanies the temporary inability to retrieve information from memory. Researchers have looked into lethologica and found some interesting aspects to this frustrating feeling.
The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon is universal.Surveys suggest that around 90 percent of speakers of different languages from all over the world report experiencing moments where memories seem momentarily inaccessible.
These moments occur quite often and this frequency increases with age. Young people typically have tip-of-the-tongue moments about once each week, while older adults find that they may occur as often as once each day.
People often remember partial bits of information. For example, they may remember the letter the word they are searching for begins with or the number of syllables the word contains.
When you experience lethologica, you know that the word you are looking for is there, it's just tantalisingly outside of your grasp. It seems to have been closed off, behind some kind of mental brick wall. When something finally comes along to trigger the missing information, the sense of relief is real! There doesn't appear to be any particular reason why lethologica happens, beyond being simply tired, or perhaps the memory wasn't properly stored in the first place. Interestingly the phenomenon occurs more frequently in bilingual people, suggesting that the presence of competing words for the same meaning can have an interfering influence.
So what can you do when you are struck by a "tip-of-the-tongue" moment? One tentative study suggests it could be as simple as squeezing your fist. "By clenching your left fist (or, theoretically, any significant portion of the left side of your body) you increase blood-flow to the contralateral or right hemisphere, which gives the retrieval mechanisms a lift," it is claimed. In the study they did a 90 second clench, but you can try shorter intervals for a possible memory boost. If nothing else it could relax your mind and help you to focus on something else, because the more you beat yourself up trying to remember the word, the harder it actually becomes.
