Use what you can recall to help bootstrap your memory into remembering what you can't.
You are sitting with your friends, discussing the latest movie releases, when someone asks the name of a performer who starred in a recent film. Frustratingly, you can remember what she looks like, the fact that you saw her film from last year, and even that her name has three syllables and starts with an A, but the name just does not come to mind.
This experience, in which a memory seems to be "on the tip of the tongue," is exasperating if you're trying to remember a particular fact, but intriguing if you're interested in how memory works.
One of the most fascinating things about the tip-of-the-tongue state is that it demonstrates how sometimes we know that we know something, without actually being able to recall it. This is part of what psychologists call metacognition, which allows us to realize that we should keep trying even though our memories might be failing us at a particular moment. Much research has focused on metacognition and memory, because experiences like the tip-of-the-tongue state are relatively common in everyday life.
Studies have shown that tip-of-the-tongue states happen about once per week on average and get more common as we get older. Other research has focused on conditions that affect the likelihood of successful recall, suggesting some good techniques for overcoming tip-of-the-tongue when it occurs.
When people fall into a tip-of-the-tongue state, they commonly focus on the few relevant things that they can remember, hoping that the elusive fact will pop into their mind after the effort of increased concentration. A more successful technique is to try to recall as much information about the topic as possible, no matter how loosely it is related.
For example, in the situation described in the previous section, I might try to remember the plots and details of other movies I know the performer has been in, as well as what I was doing when I saw the original version of the film and who I was with. I could also try to remember what music was in the film, whether the actress has any brothers or sisters, and even which of my friends said she gave a good performance last time we talked about her.
If I could recall some aspect of the name (such as the number of syllables, or perhaps some of the sounds in the name), I could also try recalling words that sound similar, regardless of whether they are related in meaning to the thing I'm trying to remember.
As you work through these techniques, one of them will likely help you to recall the fact you are hoping to retrieve (in our example, the name of the woman in the movie). If you have other people to bounce ideas off, all the better, because it increases the chance that someone will be able to remember the answer.
Tip
You can use similar priming techniques to remember where you left misplaced objects.
Memory is thought to rely heavily on a network of related mental concepts. The technique given here takes advantage of this network to make a difficult-to-recall fact more accessible to consciousness by activating as many related concepts in the network as possible.
One of the key concepts in psychology is priming, in which experiencing or thinking about one concept makes related concepts more readily available to the mind. For example, if the word dinner is shown to people in an experiment, they will react more quickly to words like spoon and vegetable than to words like airplane and paper, because words associated with food and dining are probably more closely and highly interconnected.
By thinking of as many related concepts as possible, you are increasing the activation in the area of memory that your target fact is connected to, thereby making it easier for your mind to lift the fact into consciousness.
The psychologist Endel Tulving proposed a related theory called the encoding specificity principle, which states that successful recall relies on the overlap between the thing you are trying to remember and the situation in which you first encountered it, and the cues or prompts that are available when you are trying to recall it.1 The technique given here allows you to manipulate the context in your own mind to increase the chances of recall.
Just remembering related facts is only part of the process, however. Research has shown that hearing, reading, or thinking of similar-sounding words can also help overcome the tip-of-the-tongue state.2 Models of language and memory suggest that meaning and word structure are stored separately, leading to the experience of remembering facts without being able to recall the word associated with them. In some cases, word structure is only partially remembered, so first letters or syllables are recalled, but nothing else. Priming seems to work as well for sounds as it does for facts and concepts, which is why you can remember the target word more easily by remembering words that sound like it.
Tulving, E. 1983. Elements of Episodic Memory. Oxford University Press.
James, L.E., and D.M. Burke. 2000. "Phonological priming effects on word retrieval and tip-of-the-tongue experiences in younger and older adults." Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Language, 26 (6), 1378–1391.
Priming tutorial from Harvey G. Shulman; http://www.psy.ohio-state.edu/psy312/priming.html.
Guide to tip-of-the-tongue experiences; http://www.memory-key.com/EverydayMemory/TOT.htm.
Vaughan Bell
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