As we were talking about verbal blunders and TOTs last week, I found it interesting to let you know about a kind of weird experiment done by Simner and Ward (2006). They conducted their experiment on 6 participants with synaesthesia. It is a condition where people have cross-wiring between senses in their brains, which means that they might experience sounds as images, numbers as colours, or words as tastes.
What Simner and his colleague wanted to know is whether synaesthetes can turn tastes into words, given that they can do the reverse. To do so, in the lab they tried to induce a TOT in these participants by showing them images of unusual objects. They indeed succeeded in inducing a tip of the tongue. Then, they asked the participants what words they tasted on their tongues before recalling the name of that object. What was amazing is that these people, in trying to remember, did taste words that could match up with the word in question.
Simner and Ward suggest that this sort of experience might be active in all of us, but we are unconscious of it. What do u think? Have you had such an experience before?
You can read the whole article on the following link:
http://www.spring.org.uk/2008/01/on-tip-of-tongue-blocked-memories.php