Remember that time when you couldn't say the name of that thing, that — uh, whatchamacallit?
That lapse of memory has a name: Lethologica, the situation when a known word is on the tip of your tongue, but you can't get it out.
Authors Roger Kreutz and Richard Roberts recently examined this phenomenon in their book, Changing Minds: How Aging Affects Language and How Language Affects Aging.
Turns out that people everywhere experience the Tip Of the Tongue (TOT) problem. It gets more frequent with age, but across all ages, the same percentage of lapses are eventually resolved, meaning the word is found.
Why does it happen? The authors say that instances of TOT are not predictable and their cause is grist for speculation only. It might be that failure to grab a word out of the gray matter is a sign of weakening connections between concept and memory. On the other hand, at least one psychologist says that older adults might have the problem because they just have a lot of knowledge to sift through.
