Article Summary “Lethologica: When a word’s on a tip of your tongue” by Mark Gwynn
Article Summary“Lethologica: When a word’s on a tip of your tongue” by Mark Gwynn appeared in the BBC Future on 9 February 2016.
In this article Gwynn tells us about a phenomenon of lethologica and how does it help us to better understand the way human memory functions.In the article we are given the explanation of origin of the term lethologica and how often this phenomenon had been noticed throughout human history and culture. But mainly the body of the article is focused on giving its readers some basic ideas about the overall functioning of verbal memory. It has been said that our brain does not function similarly to a computer where all the information, no matter the kind of it, is stored equally reliable and is also equally easy to retrieve.
According to this article, our processes of memorizing and retrieving of information carry their function through the mechanism of prioritizing the incoming bits of data. Information with the highest priority is that we use often or that is connected with a bigger number of other important information through associations.
However, that does not mean humans are incapable of memorizing the information they will use rarely. It is more about that information that we use rare or have nothing to attach it to is retrieved with much more effort than basic everyday words and facts. That is why we often struggle to find the right word to name something if this word does not belong to our everyday vocabulary and that is why our process of trying to retrieve these words we start to go through all synonyms we can find at the moment.
In order to repeat the process of memorizing in reverse, we try to find an association we have already made to get to the path to the word we seek for. This article is a good read for people who are interested in how our brain functions but have not yet moved deep enough into the topic to take on the heftier books and scientific …
