Tip of the tongue phenomenon: Why can’t you remember the words that are on the tip of your tongue?

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We all have this experience: the words are on the tip of our tongue, but we just can't remember how to say them... This is called the "tip of the tongue phenomenon", which is caused by the brain's temporary suppression of memory content, or in other words, the inability of the brain to retrieve words from memory. Once someone reminds us, we blurt out the words in an instant. What is this frustrating situation (language retrieval failure)? Does this mean that the person's memory of the things referred to by the language has been forgotten?

The so-called forgetting is that we can no longer recognize or recall what we once remembered, or we can recognize and recall it incorrectly. But this is not the main point of today's article. In our long memory, there are many houses that we may no longer find. They are hidden deep in the maze of memory. As long as there are clues, we will retrieve that memory.

On February 25, 1988, during a show in Worcester, Massachusetts, Bruce Springsteen forgot the opening lyrics to “Born to Run,” his greatest hit of all time.

According to the conventional wisdom about forgetting that held in the first decades of the 20th century, this shouldn’t happen at all. Forgetting seemed to be the inevitable result of entropy: the formation of memories represented a kind of order in our brains, and that order would inevitably turn to disorder. Given enough time, cliffs would crumble into the sea, new cars would fall to pieces, and blue jeans would fade.

As Springsteen said in the song “Atlantic City,” “ It all goes to hell, baby, that’s the way it is. ” How could the information in our brains be any different?

Bruce Springsteen's brief struggle to recall the opening lyrics of "Born to Run" can reveal something about how memory works. © Stan Grossfeld/theBostonGlobe/GettyImages

In this cognitive model, information such as lyrics need to be memorized repeatedly, and no one could accuse Springsteen of not paying attention to the lyrics to "Born to Run." He must have sung the 1975 hit thousands of times before 1988. So when he found himself staring at an expectant Worcester audience, he could do nothing but admit into the microphone, "Damn, I forgot the lyrics."

According to the entropy model of forgetting, this lapse makes no sense. But if this cognitive model is wrong (Springsteen is not the only one whose brain has short-circuited), the consequences are serious. The world’s schools and education systems were built on the best psychological theory of the early 20th century, and if these learning models—and the opposite forgetting models—are wrong, the damage to learners is incalculable. How many of us have wasted countless hours of meaningless repetition—a golf swing, a French verb, a wedding speech—before we learn anything?

The study of forgetting dates back to the late 19th century, when psychology researchers began incorporating mathematical tools into their experiments. German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus studied his ability to recall information by memorizing long strings of nonsense syllables and then recording how well he remembered them over time.

He found that his ability to recall these decreased in a curvilinear manner over time: he quickly forgot most of the syllables he had worked so hard to memorize, but a small number of them remained in his memory, even after a long time had passed.

© ResearchGate

The result was straightforward— forgetting is the result of information erosion . But even in these early studies, there were fluctuations in the data, suggesting that there are many other reasons for forgetting. Importantly, the time between each of Ebbinghaus's experiments had a big impact on memory, and remembering new things more often than if they were crammed together.

© ResearchGate

It's a mysterious finding, suggesting that there are still some unexplained conditions in the brain for memory formation, but at the same time, it's not surprising. In fact, most students know the benefits of splitting their study time. "Students won't force themselves to learn all the words and grammar rules in the evening, but they know that the morning is the prime time for memorization," he explained.

Such quantitative methods were unique in psychology in Ebbinghaus’s day, but a generation later they exploded in popularity. Perhaps more than anyone else, Edward L. Thorndike, a Columbia University psychologist with a keen eye for numbers, helped bring about this revolution. “If something exists, it exists in some quantity,” he believed, “and if it exists in some quantity, it can be measured.”

Psychologist Edward Thorndike (1874-1949). © Famous Psychologists

Thorndike had a profound influence on the study of psychology and the practice of education. He was a prolific writer, authoring works including arithmetic books and a series of student dictionaries that bore his name, and he created early standardized tests. He served as president, first of the American Psychological Association and later of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Perhaps most importantly, his research laid the foundation for an influential mid-20th-century psychology movement called behaviorism, which sought to explain behavior purely as a function of the external environment, rather than any intervening psychological processes.

Thorndike's cat: After the kitten successfully opened the door by pressing the pedal switch, it would use other methods (such as scratching the door panel, pushing the ceiling, etc.) to open the door less frequently. © Towards Data Science

Thorndike's early research involved animal learning, often focusing on cats, who were allowed to escape from cleverly designed cages. Through his observations, he derived three basic laws of learning in both humans and non-human animals. They concern how the brain "imprints" associations (which he called the "Law of Effect"); under what conditions learning occurs (which he called the "Law of Readiness"); and how memories retain or forget things: His Law of Exercise can be divided into two sub-theories - mobilization and shelving.

The shelving theory is simple: If you don’t mobilise a memory, you lose it. (At the same time, mobilising a memory allows it to be preserved, though only when there is a satisfying response – for example, when you enjoy the cheers of admirers.)

Thorndike's theory of forgetting was consistent with Ebbinghaus's observations, but it still failed to explain the mysterious fact that reviewing information at regular intervals seemed to imprint it in the brain and prevent it from being forgotten. It would take cognitive scientists decades to come up with a model of forgetting that could perfectly explain this problem.

At the same time, however, Thorndike’s three laws of learning underpinned the standardization of education in the early 20th century.[1]

Oblivion seems less like a cliff slowly collapsing into the sea than like a house deep in the woods that becomes increasingly difficult to find as time passes and the trees grow thicker.

To be clear, Thorndike was not responsible for the standardized form of education that emerged around the world in the 20th century. However, his view on learning— that learning is quantifiable and that some students are naturally good at it —underpinned a vision of strict standardization in schools, not only in standardized tests, but also in seating, classroom size and design, teaching methods, and student evaluation metrics. This interchangeability encouraged students to compete with each other for a supposed elite status.

In the process of standardization of education and current research, the mechanism of forgetting has been forgotten. However, two research methods were established in the 1960s and 1970s, and forgetting has gradually gained prominence since then. One method focuses on the neuronal level, using tiny electrodes implanted in cells to detect the degree of forgetting, while the other focuses on cognitive psychology, using carefully designed tests to detect forgetting.

Eric Kandel (1926-), born in Vienna, Austria, moved to the United States. Graduated from New York University in 1956. Professor at Columbia University since 1974. In 2000, he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Paul Greengard for his contributions to the field of neuroscience. © iBiology

At the cellular level, Eric Kandel co-authored a series of Nobel Prize-winning studies[2] that demonstrated that memory is achieved by strengthening the connections between neurons. He showed that learning mechanisms, whether performed in animals that are capable of learning or by electrically stimulating neurons in a dish, can lead to these strengthened connections. And, as Ebbinghaus first observed, there is a period of time between each learning event that allows these connections to strengthen further. This is true across the animal kingdom, from sea slugs[3] to mammals[4].

Therefore, the cells responsible for maintaining memories may be biased towards storing information that appears repeatedly.

But what exactly happens in the time between learning events? At the cellular level, part of the answer may be that some of the mechanisms involved in memory storage appear to require a “downtime” to rest: recharging allows neurons to strengthen memory connections before they can resume operation [5].

A different, but perhaps complementary, answer emerges from research in traditional cognitive psychology. Here, various studies have shown[6] that intervals between learning events are beneficial because, counterintuitively, they create opportunities for beneficial forgetting.

According to some theories, our memories are like a cliff that collapses over time, and once lost, they can never be recovered. © FinnbarrWebster/GettyImages

The key to understanding how forgetting can be beneficial to us is to first realize that memories are never simply strong or weak. Rather, it’s how easily you can “call up” a memory (the memory’s retrieval strength) versus how fully present it is in your mind (the memory’s storage strength).

For example, your parents' names will be high in storage and high in retrieval intensity. The opposite is true for a phone number you briefly memorized ten years ago. The name of someone you met at a party a few minutes ago may be high in retrieval but low in storage intensity.

Finally, those lyrics you can’t remember while you’re on stage at the Worcester Center have high storage and ridiculously low retrieval strength, even though you’ve sung the song thousands of times. However, if there’s an appropriate cue—for example, the audience sings the opening lyrics—the retrieval strength is instantly restored.

© TED-Ed - Tumblr

Psychologists were aware of the difference between storage and retrieval as early as the 1930s, when John Alexander McGeoch, a psychologist at the University of Missouri, asked his subjects to remember pairs of unrelated words.[7] For example, every time I said “pencil,” you were to say “chessboard.” He found that the task was made more difficult by misleading the subjects with incorrect pairs of words before asking them to repeat what they remembered: “pencil” and “cheese,” “pencil” and “table.” These “decoys” seemed to occupy the subjects’ memories.

As this line of research has taken off, the meaning of forgetting has changed. Forgetting doesn’t seem like a cliff that’s slowly collapsing into the sea; it’s more like a house deep in the woods that’s becoming increasingly difficult to find. The house may be perfect—that is, its storage intensity remains high—but if the path to memory is surrounded by walls, the clear path becomes a veritable maze.

By performing challenging retrieval tasks, you can increase the storage strength of a given memory and increase the chances of successful future memory retrieval.

© Live Science

In Springsteen’s case, it was easy to see how his mental pathfinding might have gone off the rails. “The reason for forgetting the words to the song was apparently that he was so focused on conveying to the audience the new meaning the song had taken on for him over the years,” the music critic for the Los Angeles Times wrote a few days after the event. The new interpretation of the song meant that he was tracing back the same old memory with a different set of clues: a different starting point. Suddenly, the song’s opening lines, which had once been committed to memory, were no longer recollectable.

But soon, the singing started again. Assuming that storage strength accessibility remained constant this time, the results it presented were consistent with cutting-edge research at the time around retrieval and storage strength—although these metrics are different from each other, they are not independent.

In a landmark 1992 paper, “The New Theory of Disuse,”[8] a conversation between cognitive psychologists Robert A. Bjork and Elizabeth Bjork at UCLA at Thorndike, they described a fascinating interplay between storage and retrieval. They showed that retrieving a memory can increase the strength of storage, but that the gains decay.

You might meet someone at a party and repeat her name in an attempt to increase the strength of your memory, but the effect of repetition is limited: the sixth repetition will not increase the strength of the memory significantly compared to the fifth. However, the Bjorks call “effortful retrieval” of a memory, which increases storage strength.

Robert Bjork tells us in Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn that once a name is semi-forgotten, “ after a while, look across the room and try to recall the person’s name—it may greatly increase your chances of remembering the name that evening or the next day. ”

By performing challenging retrieval tasks, you can increase the storage strength of a given memory and increase the chances of successful future memory retrieval.

Learning improves the connections between neurons during memory formation in all animals, and learning happens at regular intervals. © ArchivePhotos/GettyImages

In the case of a party, forgetting occurs between meeting someone new and later realizing you’ve forgotten her name. However, in a series of early experiments beginning in the 1970s[9], Robert Bjork found other ways to disorient his subjects on the path to memory. For example, he introduced confusing or irrelevant memories or removed sensory cues to the memory—sights, sounds, and smells that might trigger it—by asking them to recall the information in new contexts.

Regardless of how forgetting occurs, overcoming it results in stronger, more lasting memories.

Today, well-timed forgetting is part of a whole package of educational methods that the Bjorks call “desirable difficulty”: strategies that may annoy students at first but ultimately pay dividends. For example, this approach to making memories more durable can be achieved by spacing out study schedules or by interleaving one subject’s study time with another. Putting material aside and then revisiting it can also eliminate students’ perception of error, since memories with temporarily high retrieval strength may become difficult to recall after a few days.

In the years after the publication of Shelving New Theories, the Bjorks worked to spread knowledge about forgetting and other phenomena that make recall difficult—work made necessary by the fact that schools are not typically set up to promote laudable forgetting.

As numerous research papers have shown[10], on test day, students who cram actually perform better than those who study in intervals. It is only after a few weeks or months that the benefits of spacing out materialize, with the “spaced study” students outperforming the students who cram. But by then, the test is long over.

When Thorndike's learning theory was first developed, many standardized systems regarding educational time and educational assessment had already been established, which, to this day, inhibit the truly beneficial ways of learning that we know of.

It shouldn’t be a burden on learners of all ages—including working adults—to fully utilize our ability not only to absorb new information, but also to recall it when we need it. It’s even reasonable to think that knowledge we thought might have been lost in the sands of time is still lurking in our brains, waiting for the relevant clues to resurface.

As Springsteen said in Atlantic City, even though everything will be destroyed, the next line is: "But maybe one day it will all be resurrected."

References:

[1]www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315734255-6/thorndike-enduring-contributions-educational-psychology-richard-mayer

[2]www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2000/press-release/

[3]www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC155928/

[4]https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1973-22614-001

[5]www.nature.com/articles/nrn.2015.18

[6]escholarship.org/content/qt3rr6q10c/qt3rr6q10c.pdf

[7]psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fh0069819

[8]www.researchgate.net/publication/281322665_A_new_theory_of_disuse_and_an_old_theory_of_stimulus_fluctuation

[9]www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022537170801037

[10]laplab.ucsd.edu/articles/Cepeda%20et%20al%202008_psychsci.pdf

Text/Sanjay Sarma, Luke Yoquinto

Translated by Hang Zhao

Proofreading/Roth

Original article/www.bbc.com/future/article/20221121-the-benefits-of-being-forgetful

This article is based on the Creative Commons License (BY-NC) and is published by Hang Zhao on Leviathan

The article only reflects the author's views and does not necessarily represent the position of Leviathan