Article
Overview
“A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over.” - Benjamin Franklin
Often a client will say to me, “I know it. It is just on the tip of my tongue.” The tip -of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon is about the sensation that I know the answer, but I can’t quite access it and say it. An example might be the desire to say a person’s name or a word and can’t quite retrieve it from memory even though you can remember that it starts with the letter “M.” You can hear the music, see the picture of the movie and the director, but cannot recall the name of the movie just when you want to say it. The name can come to you an hour later when you don’t need it.
TOT is also known as lethologica which is about almost being able to recall a word a phrase from memory and having the feeling that it will come to you in a second. This dynamic is so common that it is referred to as a “TOT state.” This happens when the left temporal and frontal areas of your brain momentarily do not work together to recall words, names, or phrases stored in your memory.
In psychology this can be referred to as a Freudian “slip of the tongue” which is likened to an error in speaking whereby the speaker had no conscious intention of saying what was said. A Freudian slip is a mistake that comes up from the unconscious mind. This is also known as a parapraxis, as these slips may come from secret thoughts or feelings and these slips can express unconscious attitudes or impulses. There are 3 types of slips of the tongue: sound, morpheme (part of a word) and word errors.
Common Freudian slips may be:
- Mispronouncing/misreading a word.
- Saying a similar word to the one you are trying to read.
- Calling your child by their sibling’s name
The following poem explains this atmosphere the tongue can happen to create:
When the tongue slips, the heart speaks,
As this is when the heart leaks.
Free of the inhibitions of thoughts words said reflect the heart’s true desires: love, hate, disgrace.
When you ‘accidentally’ called his name,
I knew it was end of the game, so I
Took my belongings and stepped away.
It made no sense for me to stay.
My only regret,
Is that my tongue slipped too;
And what it said was ‘I love you. - Leslie Alexis
“The tongue is a small thing, but what enormous damage it can do.” – James 3.5