“The consternation [of TOT phenomenon] represents a cognitive response to the difficulty in being unable to enact a cognitive function that serves a particular intent or purpose,” Giordano says. “Failures to satisfy drive states incurs physiological responses that are interpreted as frustrating or, at worst, suffering.”
And as for the way we fidget, clench our fists, tut and sigh, acting physically in response to such cognitive stress, he calls them “classic frustration behavior responses.” “We are animals, let’s not forget,” says Giordano.
What’s The Use?
And as always, nothing happens in the brain unless it’s evolved to be a survival advantage — or represents the temporary breakdown or failure of one. Is your brain presenting you with the shape, color, size, the very feel of a memory without the actual nomenclature a feature or a glitch?
There’s a lot of recent research around the phenomenon of forgetting, for example — about how the brain is actually built to actively facilitate the loss or destruction of memories/engrams, rather than them just degrade through lack of use.
Might TOT simply be the expression of a very purposeful process of clearing out — after all, how is the name of your favorite actress a survival advantage when more pressing needs might fill your day-to-day attention?
Access gets harder the more we have stored and it’s harder still for less familiar items that are ingrained less strongly. So far, so obvious. But memory in the (at least human) brain has a curious work style. It doesn’t consist of isolated items filed away in drawers or files, passive until the next time they’re retrieved. They’re living, evolving networks. Some memory is “semantic” — the French word for “cheese” or your spouse’s phone number. Some is much more personal to you — what is considered “episodic” memory.
But they all cross pollinate, nest in each other like Russian dolls and can change each time we recall them. Has TOT got to do with the fidelity or “quality” of the signal strength as a slice of your entire experiential worldview?
While myriad information bits and experiences are codified across our lifespan, Giordano says the “use it or lose it” adage applies. “The architectures, efficiency, and fortitude of neural network connectivities are maintained and preserved as a consequence of use or relative ‘value’,” he says. “That value refers to the importance of the information, either encoded as profoundly good or profoundly bad experiences or for its utility providing a conditioning effect for subsequent decisions and actions in response to certain stimuli.”
He adds that while other network connections exist both functionally and structurally, their access is limited and the information stays in the pre- or subconscious.
The Machine Around The Ghost
But here’s something that’s even more interesting about TOT. While knowing you know thing sand knowing you don’t know others seem like fairly abstract principles expressed by specific activity across the memory architecture (the hippocampus, basal ganglia, parietal lobe, and countless others play a part), neurology has shown we can be a bit more specific.
TOT states are associated with the anterior cingulate, right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and right inferior cortex. None of those regions are active under the influence of the opposite phenomenon — feeling of knowing states (when you don’t know something right then but you’re reasonably confident you can recall it at the appropriate prompting),
Can TOT memory states be that easy to isolate, maybe even to action or recalibrate? Frank reminds us that considering certain regions to be “responsible” for certain brain activity comes from studies about blood flow (and overgeneralizations thereof) than from understanding about how information flows across distributed brain networks.
But the human brain continues to confound us, even when we decide we’re being too mechanistic. Giordano talks about work that stimulates specific brain areas to evoke or disinhibit long past and/or cryptic memories. One such study, DARPA’s Restoring Active Memory program is exploring how current and emerging neurotechnology can be used to activate brain networks to restore, reinforce and re-enable memory functions.
That’s It!
The moment has passed, your embarrassment and frustration have subsided and the conversation has moved on to what’s on the menu or your plans for the weekend. You’ve almost forgotten the conversation completely and like a proverbial light going on in your head, the actresses’ name you struggled painfully over earlier is suddenly right there.
Like chasing a mouse across the kitchen floor makes it only run faster, the act of struggling to remember the fragment seems to constantly push it out of your reach. Why would it so effortlessly pop up minutes, hours, or even days later?
The software running around in our head analogy turns out to be kind of fitting. When we’re not actively chasing the memory around, recruiting more noise into the signal, associative pairing or some other unconscious prompt might re-engage the original properties of the network, and our memory recall apparatus goes down the much simpler path towards recall that should have occurred the first time.
More From Brain World
- All in Your Head? Why Some Memories Last a Lifetime
- Beyond The Books: 6 Tips For Improving Learning and Memory
- Building a Better Brain: Understanding How We Learn
- Eating for Brainpower: How Eating Better Can Fight Memory Loss
- Time in a Bottle: The Mystery of Déjà Vu
- What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
