Messy and Creative

I’ve forgotten the source, but I remember reading that many different languages refer to the tongue in their traditional expressions for those times when you’re not able to remember the name of something but know you’ll recognize it as soon as it pops into consciousness---it’s on the tip of your tongue. As I remember, this part of the book was about the importance of gestures in the origins of language and also the fact that movements of the tongue are gestures of a sort.

Anyway, there’s a new wrinkle in the research about this common “tip of the tongue” experience. Neuroscientists have scanned the brain while it searches for a name the subject is trying to remember. You won’t have to suffer even moderately from what my Thesaurus calls a "youth deficiency" to find this brief article interesting, but it certainly won’t hurt.