1054: Tip of the Tongue Oct 28, 2017

Every person will have experienced the feeling of having a word on the tip of the tongue, so to speak, and not be able to think of something but feeling that it should normally be simple. The name for this phenomenon is, unimaginatively perhaps, "tip of the tongue" (TOT), and though the knowledge of the neurological mechanisms for this need more research and there are several distinct theories about it, the experience of TOT is understood to be fairly universal, with people often remembering certain syllables, certain—usually first—letters, or only remembering words that are similar, either semantically or phonologically. TOT has implications in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, but also other fields which relate to memory or (meta)cognition.