How can our brains always remember the first letter of the word we are trying to recall but not the whole word?
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I’m not sure if neuroscience knows enough to answer this question in detail, but my best guess would be that the first letter of a word is being used as a “memory trace”. Basically, you have some memory (in this case a word) stored in a big network of connected brain cells (an engram). If the brain cells are all strongly connected to each other, you will be able to activate the whole network just by activating a few cells (pattern completion).
If your brain is trying to remember a word, it begins by activating a relatively small number of cells that are strongly connected to all of the others in the network (the memory trace). When the recall is successful and you remember the word, the whole network has fully activated. When the recall is not successful, then the activity in the network wasn’t enough to activate the whole memory, so the activity fizzles out without completing the whole pattern (the word). This process involves the hippocampus, the medial temporal lobe, and the prefrontal cortex.
I would also recommend reading more about the visual word form area ([link](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_word_form_area)), since activity in this part of the brain seems to be associated with word recognition and recall. It’s possible that the letters on the end of a word are being used as memory traces for encoding whole words in this and/or other parts of the brain. So activating just the cells that represent the first letter might be your brain’s attempt to complete the memory (the whole word) by activating some memory traces.
When you are trying to remember something specific your brain starts locking doors. It locks doors on information that’s close but not it. Sometimes it locks the wrong door.
It’s called the bathtub effect, because of the shape of the graph of what part of the word we are most likely to recall.
There is a greater likelihood to recall the first part of the word, less likelihood of recalling the middle part and again a high likelihood of recalling the last part.
It happens because that’s how we store visual information about the words. See how you asked about the “first letter”, implying that you are as well.asking about the written and printed letters and not the sound. We commit to our brain the initial and last parts of a word better than the middle parts.
This helps us in reading fast. You look at the first part and the last part of the word, which are easy to identify because of the surrounding white space before and after the word. The middle of the word is what you just “fill in” from context. You don’t really read the middle part.
It is this reason why it is esay for you to raed tihs setnece even though it wasn’t all written correctly. Did you notice the spelling mistakes in the previous sentence? Did you manage to read it nevertheless?
Mavrellous!
We also hold words in muscle memory. When words are spoken, our voice box is sympathetic towards the vibration, and imitates the waveform. Next time you are having difficult with the whole word, sound it out – the melodic flow of the prosody is often enough to trigger our muscle memory.
T…t…..tur-tah-tah-tah….Hm… OH! Tu-ran-tu-la
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