Why do we forget to speak while it is on the tip of the tongue?

Sometimes we forget to speak while it is on the tip of the tongue, so what is the scientific reason? Is there a solution!

How many times have you happened to be talking to someone and suddenly you stop trying to remember a word and trying hard but without success and accompanying you the phrase “The word is on the top of my tongue and I cannot remember it” and you feel as if the word has disappeared from your dictionary and when that happens you sometimes resort to some alternative synonyms or close, similar words Or words of equal weight to search for a word that can fill that void.

The history of the phenomenon

All these words that are lost from you fall under the natural tendency of the human being to forget names, people and places. This phenomenon is not at all new, but it was studied back in 1915 by the psychologist Carl Jung. This phenomenon is known as the inability to remember appropriate names or words in the English language as "Lethologica".

And this term was coined from the classical Greek language. The first part of that term “lethe” means (forgetting), while the second part of it, “logos”, means (word), which is one of the five rivers in the underworld. Roman and Greek myths tell that drinking from This river makes the souls of the dead assume new bodies, making them forget what happened to them in their previous life in the underworld, and then these five rivers form the boundaries between the land of the living and the land of the dead.

What is the tip of the tongue phenomenon?

When you speak, the mind converts these thoughts into words and words into sentences, as this translation is done through thousands of words saved in the brain, and after choosing the appropriate word, it is converted into sounds to get the words out of order.

But when this phenomenon occurs, you find that a word has been lost from you and you have lost the smoothness of speech and the arrangement of the sentences, so your mind stops at it trying to remember it or find words close to it, as the words are not present and ready as we imagine, but you need to retrieve and this retrieval needs frequent use of words and their presence in the mind.

The cause of the tip of the tongue phenomenon

Words used

The number of words that are present in our brain, as we mentioned, is innumerable. There are words that are used on a daily basis and words that we do not speak much. Words that are not mentioned are usually the most vulnerable to forgetting and loss because the mind connects the word with the information and the ability to remember is linked to this connection.

The same applies not to those that are not linked, but also to the words that we use, but at the same time they have not been linked with enough information.

Psychological state

Recent studies have shown that feelings of sadness, fear, and remembering old bad situations and stressful situations cause distraction and loss of the ability to remember. It has been found that the more negative emotions, the higher the rate of forgetting words.

Old age

The age factor, which plays a big role in finding difficulties in remembering some words, because memory weakens with age, and the use of words decreases more.

Caffeine

There is no doubt that drinking a cup of coffee or tea in the morning stimulates the work of memory, but recent studies have shown that increasing caffeine intake makes it interact with neurotransmitters in the brain and reduces a person's ability to remember, which causes a person's ability to remember certain words stored in short-term memory.

multilingual

People who speak more than one language find it difficult to remember the words of the least used language, and they also face a problem in translating them from one language to another despite their mastery of both languages, because of course there are more words that a person understands, but he does not use them in his speech or writing on a daily basis and thus These untapped vocabulary form a great framework for the words that we try to remember, we cannot, and which make us go through the experience of forgetting.

What should be done?

• When you have forgotten a word, ask the person in front of you to help you to increase your memory by mentioning details or what is related to place and time.

• Review and read books from all the languages ​​that you are proficient in, to avoid forgetting many terms.

What should be avoided?

• To fill the word with any other word, but you must try to remember it to find it.

• Do not search for the word, just try to remember it because if you search for it you will forget it again.