What Happens in Your Brain When Words or Names Don’t Immediately Come to Mind

In an informative TED-Ed lesson written by producer Cella Wright and directed by Avi Ofer, narrator Susan Zimmerman explains what happens in your brain when words or names don’t immediately come to mind. This frustrating forgetfulness is known as Lethologica or “tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.

Most of the time, our brains seamlessly summon words from vast stores of knowledge, paring their meaning and sounds, and stringing them into sentences. But in a tip-of-the-tongue moment, this retrieval process derails, and there’s the sensation of remembering the word but the struggle to recall it. 

This tip-of-the-tongue state actually challenges different parts of the brain at the same time.

In these moments, on top of the usual brain activity associated with word retrieval, we also see other brain regions light up, like the conflict-detecting anterior cingulate, which generates that urgently frustrating feeling. It’s unclear whether the target word is directly detected and just not successfully recalled, or associations are simply helping the brain infer that it has the word.The reality could also be some combination of these hypotheses.

This challenge is also healthy for memory, as it motivates and rewards.

But while tip-of-the-tongue states may feel like the brain is failing, they seem to have a positive function. Words don’t usually go past the point of no return and get permanently forgotten so much as they tend to get tougher to access. That tough-to-shake, tip-of-the-tongue feeling of impending success just around the corner may help motivate us and make us more likely to remember.