Find the Fact on the Tip of Your Tongue

Quick Win

Try these techniques the next time you forget someone’s name or draw a blank during a presentation.

Try This Today

• Take a few slow, deep breaths. Getting stressed when you can’t recall a name or fact can make the situation worse. But if you stay calm and centered, you'll often think of the missing word in a minute or so, according to Boston University neurologist Andrew Budson, M.D., and neuropsychologist Maureen O’Connor, authors of Seven Steps to Managing Your Memory.
• Avoid the urge to rattle off guesses. Maybe you can’t recall the title of a movie, but you think it begins with the letter B. Rather than listing off words that begin with B, focus instead on any details about the movie that you remember. Here’s why: Thinking about similar-sounding but wrong names can actually block the right answer, Budson and O’Connor say.
• Use your hands. Do you gesture with your hands when you’re trying to remember something? Turns out, it can be an effective tactic. A 2021 study found that hand gestures helped people resolve their memory hiccups. Clenching a fist can also help release some stuck memories, according to earlier research.

Why

Tip-of-the-tongue moments — when we know a word but just can’t seem to spit it out — are so common that cognitive scientists have a name for them: TOTs. Older adults experience TOTs as often as once per day, according to a review published in Memory & Cognition in 2011. That’s when tactics like simple body movements can help. When you’re struggling with a TOT, gesturing with your hands may help by temporarily lightening your cognitive load, according to a study published in 2021 in Cognitive Science that examined 124 college students as they did picture-naming tasks. Clenching your hands can also help jog your episodic memory of events from the past, according to a study of 50 adults ages 18 to 48 published in PLOS One in 2013.