For those who are not specialists when it comes to remembering everything perfectly, it is a very familiar feeling to rack your brain in search of the exact expression to convey your ideas. “I know what you mean, but what’s his name?” they’d say, “I’m sure it starts with but“. This, believe it or not, is a psycholinguistic phenomenon called in the Tip of the tongue (PDL) or presque vu (almost seen).
In English they also call it lethological, deriving from the Greek: lethe (forgot) and logos (speech or word). In Greek mythology, Lete is one of the rivers of Hades and drinking its waters caused complete oblivion.
The lethologica consists of a disorder in which you temporarily forget the terms you want to articulate. And since it is a mental disorder, it has its own causes: the stressthe social interaction wave capacity of memory. It is considered a disease related to the lifestyle we lead. The aforementioned factors affect the temporal lobe, causing, as a result, the normal functioning of the semantic capacities of memory to be modified.
This term was coined in 1913 by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung in his book Wandlungen and Symbol of the Libido (Symbols of transformation). More detailed studies on this disorder were carried out by American psychiatrists in the 1950s. Current research identifies this memory impairment as very prevalent in the population and very variable in the seriousness of its manifestation.
So the next time the word you need doesn’t come to mind, you can distract your friends with these curious facts.