Has it ever happened to you to have a word at the tip of your tongue, or to not remember what someone said to you a few minutes earlier? These small glitches in our memory are very common and are nothing to worry about—even if they can be the cause of some frustrations. They are linked to the manner in which our brain stores and retrieves memorized information:

- To properly store information, the key consists in concentrating our attention. Most of the time, when we forget a piece of information, it is because we have processed it automatically, without paying attention to it, or because our attention was solicited elsewhere. All it takes, for example, is to think about what we have to do for the day or to receive a notification for our attention to be diverted. Our brain then assumes that the information to which we are not truly attentive is not sufficiently important to be memorized.

- As for the “word at the tip of your tongue”, it is due to the fact that the brain mistakenly activates the wrong neural network to retrieve the information. The more you attempt to find this missing word, the more you activate this wrong network. When this occurs, the solution is therefore to accept bringing your search to a momentary halt. This gives the appropriate neural network a chance to activate when you restart your search a few instants later.

Source: How your memory works — and why forgetting is totally OK, Lisa Genova, TED Membership, March 2021.