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Article snippet: Welcome to the Smarter Living newsletter. The Smarter Living team emails readers once a week with tips and advice for living a better, more fulfilling life. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Monday morning. There you are in the middle of a conversation, and suddenly you draw a blank on a particular word. It’s right there … if you could just remember … You move on, and hours later, something jogs your memory and the word comes to you, long after its relevance has passed. So, what happened? You experienced what researchers call a tip-of-the-tongue state, that agonizing moment when you know precisely what you want to say but you fail to produce the word or phrase. Far from being telltale signs of dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, these moments are simply part of the way we communicate, and they’re more or less universal. “You can’t talk to anybody, in any culture, in any language, in any age group, that doesn’t know what you’re talking about” when you describe a tip-of-the-tongue state, said Lise Abrams, a psychology professor at the University of Florida who has studied the phenomenon for 20 years. Researchers have even found occurrences among sign language users. (Those, they call tip-of-the-finger states.) We’re more likely to draw blanks on words we use less frequently — like abacus or palindrome — but there are also categories of words that lead to tip-of-the-tongue states more often. Proper names are one of those categories. There’s no definitive theor... Link to the full article to read more