Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 15, 1991 TAG: 9104130454
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MALCOLM RITTER/ ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
. . . You know . . .
You're certain you know that blasted word, but you just can't get a good grip on it. You're going through what has been called "mild torment, something like the brink of a sneeze."
Psychologists call it a TOT, a tip-of-the-tongue experience, and while they have gained some insight into this mental glitch they are still debating what causes it.
The researchers hope to accomplish more than explaining why you can't quite recall your college buddy's name at a reunion.
"One of the intriguing aspects is that it may shed some light into how the retrieval process works and how information is stored in memory," said researcher Alan Brown, an associate professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
"If the gears get a little bit stuck in the retrieval process, like in the TOT state, perhaps that can slow down the process so that we can get a glimpse at the mechanics."
TOTs may give clues about more severe language difficulties, such as those seen after strokes, he said.
In addition, "I think it's one of the most important memory problems that occurs [more frequently] as we age," said psychologist Deborah Burke of Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., whose TOT research is financed by the National Institute on Aging.
"People are afraid when this happens, and they take this as a sign that they're really losing it," she said. In fact, she said, older people should not be upset if they get TOTs with infrequently used words or names of people they haven't seen in a few years. More serious is being unable to name common objects like a spoon, she said.
Burke said researchers have unduly neglected TOTs in the past, but she and Brown said they have recently noticed an increase in interest. Brown attributes it in part to new emphasis in studying the psychology of aging.
In the March issue of the journal Psychological Bulletin, Brown said studies so far have provided some answers about TOTs:
Just about everybody has them, including elementary school children. Younger adults say they get them once or twice a week, and older adults typically count two to four. These numbers are probably underestimates, because many are probably forgotten, Brown said.
TOTs are triggered most frequently by names of acquaintances, followed by names of famous persons and objects. At least, that's what people say.
Brown cautioned that people may just be especially likely to remember TOTs involving acquaintances. After all, if you can't think of "acrimonious," you can quickly switch to "caustic" and forget the memory block. But if you can't think of Aunt Sadie's name as you struggle to introduce her, there's no substitute. And you'll remember that TOT.
About half the time, people find the word they want within a minute.
Some 40 percent to 70 percent of the time, people think of a word that is related to the word they want. Usually it sounds the same, less often it has a similar meaning.
People in the throes of a TOT correctly guess the first letter of the word they want at least half the time, and they can often guess the last letter.
A controversial issue is explaining the folk wisdom that the missing word can pop up out of the blue when you're thinking of something else. Was your unconscious continuing to search for the word, or are you simply responding to some subtle and easily forgotten cue in the environment? Or both?
Burke said a man suddenly recalled the name of the California town of Ojai, pronounced "O-hi," after muttering, "Oh, hell."
But she added there may be some sort of "incubation effect," like that reported by mathematicians who take a stroll and suddenly solve a tough problem. Whether it requires a cue is not clear, she said.
The basic unresolved question is what causes TOTs. Nobody claims to know what goes wrong physically in the brain. Instead, the debate centers on more abstract descriptions of mental processing.
Burke and colleagues will publish a hypothesis this year that blames TOTs on a failure in the way the brain collects information to produce a word.
The idea grew out of an earlier theory that says information about the sound of a word is stored in scraps in different places in a brain network. Normally, to produce a word, the brain activates all those places and then assembles the sound scraps.
TOTs occur when this process falters, Burke suggests. Maybe the brain can activate only some scraps needed to produce a word, which might explain why people often get hints about the word's sound or think of similar-sounding words.
The theory suggests the brain has a harder time activating lesser-used and less-recently used information. Burke said that fits with her work showing that TOTs tend to involve lesser-used and less-recently used words. The theory also says aging makes it harder to reach stored information, which would account for the observed increase of TOTs with aging, she said.
Brown, however, said he is more interested in an older explanation - that TOTs occur when the brain's search for a word ends up with an incorrect but similar answer. This wrong word then diverts the brain's attention from the right answer.
Brown said he often hits on incorrect words "that hold me in their grip." But he said this hypothesis fails to explain the substantial proportion of TOTs in which people don't recall thinking of any related words.
For now, the research is finding only hints about how memory works, leaving Brown with a feeling familiar to anybody in a TOT.
"It's almost a tease," he said, "and that keeps you going."
by CNB