It's on the tip of my tongue

That moment when you can almost recall something, it's there, you can feel it, you can almost see it, but it won't manifest.

"It's on the tip of my tongue"

People have put forward plenty of theories to explain it, but do we care about theories? No we do not.

Do we care how to avoid it? Well, we avoid it with effective storage strategies such that we can recall it.

Do we know who to trigger access to it, when we didn't store it effectively?

The alphabet strategy:

• Cycle through the letters of the alphabet and see if that triggers it. It might help you narrow down the range of values.

The context strategy:

• You could access the environment where you think you stored it. e.g. if you were told the fact, or name, or whatever is on the tip of your tongue by someone. Then imagine them telling you again. Visualise the place they told you in. Remember some of the background noises. All of that context can help your brain plot a route to the stored information and might recall the information.

And once you have the information?

Re-store it using a variety of meta data to help you retrieve it again. Or use whatever memory technique you normally apply.

Sometimes re-storing it with newly associated meta data can work as an organic memory technique. So if you forgot someones name, but bring it back through the alphabet strategy, then re-store it, but visualising their face, and associating the face with the name. Perhaps shout it loud in your head. Stamp it on their forehead. Make the first letter really big to allow you to use the Alphabet strategy. You decide.

But if you don't do something to re-store it and make new associations that allow you to search and retrieve the information then you will face the same recall difficulties as before.