There aren’t many things that we all have in common but I’d be willing to bet that we have all experienced the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) feeling. Whether it’s a word, the name of a song, the name of somebody we’ve only met once or twice, this feeling is incredibly frustrating and if you’re anything like me, bothers you until you remember the word. Even if it’s days later.
Until now, it was thought that this sensation occurred as a result of the brain partially recollecting the answer but according to new research, this experience might actually be an illusion.
A series of experiments on college students, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General was undertaken to look further into this phenomenon. During the experiments, students were asked to answer 80 general knowledge questions with one word answers. If they couldn’t provide a correct answer, they were asked if they felt that the answer was on the tip of their tongue and if so, could they provide partial information like the first letter or what it sounded like. Those in a TOT state were more likely to try and volunteer partial information.
The Right Information Isn’t Always Tip-Of-The-Tongue
Despite many volunteering TOT guesses, they were largely incorrect. Guesses at sounds and syllables were no more likely to be right in a TOT state than otherwise. Across several experiments, first-letter guesses were only a little more likely to match the correct answer (roughly 11% versus 8%). Students thought that their guess was right 58% of the time while in TOT versus 7% otherwise.
There is some hope for those of us who experience TOT pauses though with previous research indicating that with prompts such as multiple choice answers, people are more likely to get to the correct answer.
In the concluding comments of the research, researchers state that, “Curiosity is often taken to be a pleasant experience—the happy state of an enquiring mind. This perspective, concerning the positive emotional quality of curiosity, contrasts starkly with the nagging, tormented quality so frequently ascribed to TOT states.”
It’s actually thought that TOT states are similar to déjá vu, which is common in people with neurological disorders such as epilepsy. In both TOT and déjá vu states, a feeling of familiarity occurs and our brains try to make sense of it by assuming that we’ve seen or heard it before.