Lethologica refers to a condition that sporadically hinders a person’s ability to clearly articulate their thoughts and temporarily forget names in conversations, words and phrases.
The words we rarely use, including proper names, are the ones we often forget. Because our minds are associative and are built out of patterns of interconnected information, how well we can recall a word may depend on these patterns or links to other important bits of information.
And so, the many thousands of words stored in our brains that we rarely use may be harder to recall at short notice, because we have not yet formed the necessary links to other important bits of information that make memories easily retrievable.
Lethologica is both the forgetting of a word and the trace of that word we know is somewhere in our memory. Perhaps it is necessary for us to drink from the river Lethe to help us temporarily forget the trivial and unnecessary, so we can prioritise the information that is important to our lives.
Credit : BBC
Picture Credit : Google
