Is there anything worse than when you just can’t remember a word no matter how hard you try?
Yes. Yes there is. Cancer. Smallpox. TB. Disease in general. War. Crime. Guns. X Factor. Poverty. Death, taxes, earthquakes, hard to open packaging, etc, etc.. Ok, so there are many things worse than not being able to remember a specific word, but it’s still quite annoying.
So I thought I would share my experiences, to see if others (ie, you, the reader) had similar processes or maybe even some better suggestions.
The biggest problem I find is that I will get a specific sound stuck in my head. I have the sound “an” stuck in my head, but the word I’m trying to think of begins with a “sh” sound – and no matter how hard I try, all the word I can think of keep beginning with an “an” sound, and even when I deliberately think of another word, I just find myself drifting back to the same sound, even though I’ve tried all the possibilities and it clearly doesn’t start with that (I’m 95% sure…).
The problem (I imagine) is that my brain is stuck in a particular pattern, and I need to get out of that pattern.
The way I get round that it to just start thinking of other random sounds, and indeed making that sound in my head. Not actual words, just the sounds. “be…”, “du…”, “re…”, over and over. That is all I usually need my conscious mind to do, and the rest of my mind will then suddenly make the connection, and I think of the word when I hit the right sound.
Anyway, the moral of the story is, the brain is pretty cool.
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Tags: brain, language, mind, phonetics, sounds, vocabulary, words
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 24th, 2012 at 12:38 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.