Question: if you have something "on the tip of your tounge" how does your brain know what your wanting to say?

Joseph Devlin answered on 25 Mar 2010:

Hi Christy,

The tip-of-the-tongue phenomena is one that baffles psychologists because it just doesn’t seem to make sense. In some sense, you know what you want to say conceptually but the words themselves have gotten stuck. What’s really weird is that you often know things about the words. For instance, it’s not common for someone to say, “It’s two syllables…it starts with n…” but still get stuck in producing “newton.”

As you can imagine, it’s incredibly hard to study this because it happens when it happens. So despite the fact that everyone knows what you mean, it’s hard to force the situation experimentally.

My best guess is that when we think, we don’t think in “language” — that is, not in words. So the brain has to translate our thoughts into words and occasionally this process goes south. So even if comes close and you know something about the word you want, it still isn;t always enough to find it. As we get older, the problem comes up more often and in certain clinical conditions, like Alzheimer’s disease, for example, it is a hallmark of the disease.