What causes brain farts?

Shayne Jacopian for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Do you ever have those moments where your brain seems to just… you know… what’s the word…?
What is commonly known as the “brain fart,” or tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) syndrome is an all-too-common phenomenon with no single, universally accepted cause. According to Mashable, the brain fart phenomenon was first described by psychologist William James back in 1890: “A sort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a given direction, making us at moments tingle with the sense of our closeness and then letting us sink back without the longed-for term.”
It wasn’t until the second half of the 20th century that actual research was done on the TOT syndrome. In 1966, Harvard researchers Roger Brown and David McNeil studied TOT by reading word definitions to subjects and asking them to recall the words. Oftentimes, the subjects would struggle to remember, getting closer and closer over time and showing considerable relief when they finally recalled the words. Brown and McNeil found that if you keep trying to remember a word, you eventually succeed.
Today, there are many possible explanations for what causes brain farts. Some argue that they are caused by a “temporary breakdown in lexical word retrieval,” while others maintain that it’s the entire memory retrieval system that’s temporarily malfunctioning. Still others believe that the “tip-of-the-tongue” moment is simply the feeling that you get when you try to remember something and can’t.
Research indicates that brain farts increase with age and most commonly affect short-term memory. Recent studies suggest that our brains keep more trivial facts and memories in a catch-all “box of junk”, and these are the first to go during cerebral flatulence.
Whether it has a cause, is just an emotion, or only happens when we’re trying to remember things that our brains have already decided aren’t important anyway, flatulence of the noggin is here to stay—it’s just one of those strange quirks of the human psyche.
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