And Other Train(wreck)s of Thought

So Many Ways of Losing Track

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

tl;dr This is an extension and second part to Friday’s post.

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Speech is fraught with potential pitfalls, roadblocks and dead ends. You have probably experienced them and wondered or worried about your verbal health. Here are some other all-too-common challenges.

► TIP OF THE TONGUE PHENOMENON (TOTs or LETHOLOGICA)

This often shows up as failure to retrieve a common word you know well--often a noun. The space where that word used live is empty. This happens with people of all ages and across cultures.

Often, in struggling to bring the word to mind, you are able to pull up the letter it starts with that the forgotten was purple and used in the kitchen. But bummer: not the word itself. You're so close, but there is sits on the tip, unable to be spoken because the complete memory package for that word has temporarily failed to load.

Yep, boomers, you're older than dirt. But you'll be fine. Given enough time. If you have it.

While the older adults experienced lethologica more often, the percentage of resolved instances (meaning the word was eventually found) was equal across all three [age groups]. “Given enough time, even the oldest participants resolved virtually all TOT experiences,” the study authors wrote. link

(247) How Words Get Stuck on the Tip of Your Tongue - YouTube

► THOUGHT BLOCKING

You are in the middle of a sentence that will be part of an intended paragraph so you can finish the thought. But the next sentence just disappears. (This is different from not making your point that I confessed to in the last post. )

Ruling out the possible pathological conditions that can make this occur, a sudden distraction can make that intended paragraph scamper off into the weeds.

Surprise, startle and stop: Research shows that the "stop dead in your tracks" effect of a sudden loud noise or other sudden interruption that stops your body motion also clears your cognitive chalkboard of all your careful notes.

"For now, we've shown that unexpected, or surprising, events recruit the same brain system we use to actively stop our actions, which, in turn, appears to influence the degree to which such surprising events affect our ongoing trains of thought."

… "The radically new idea is that just as the brain's stopping mechanism is involved in stopping what we're doing with our bodies it might also be responsible for interrupting and flushing out our thoughts," Wessel concluded. "It might also be potentially interesting to see if this system could be engaged deliberately—and actively used to interrupt intrusive thoughts or unwanted memories."

Why do I stop talking mid-sentence? The Psychology Of Thought Blocking

HINT: Why, some have asked, am I up every day so crazy early? Because I cherish the two hours I spend alone without being forced to stop my thought process when my wife suddenly hollers from the kitchen to ask me to help her locate the missing (what is that purple thing we strain noodles in? Starts with a C.) And then it takes 15 minutes to circle back around to maybe recover a few fragments of the blocked thought.

The Neuroscience of Losing Your Train of Thought | Psychology Today

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And coming round finally to my point…

As a physical therapist, I used to tell discouraged ankle-knee-hip patients not to take walking for granted. Early in their rehab towards normal ambulation they should not be discouraged by stumbles.

Walking seems like a simple thing, but it is really a complex and carefully-orchestrated FALL we have to learn how to control.

So if any of you use spoken words in your activities of daily living, cut yourself some slack. Speech is not a slam-dunk. Using the right logic, crafting complete and appropriate sentences and finding all the just-so words is miracle. Hopefully it will happen to each of us in our lifetimes.

And once again (since only 4 readers clicked the link last time, you know you want to improve your memory track record. This short video will be 9 minutes well spent. If you don’t watch it now, YOU WILL FORGET. Betcha.