Sunday, April 22, 2007

Why do I have word blanks?

When I'm talking, and sometimes even just thinking to myself I have mental word blanks. This morning I couldn't remember "procrastinate". And I just had to take 5 goes at it then. It's never that I don't know or am unfamiliar with a word, it just goes. This really sucks when I'm talking to people. Even worse when public speaking. It's made worse by knowing there is "the" correct word for what I'm trying to describe, and if it goes then I'm left with "the metal dealy that you dig food with".
I think I need to find out what's going on, it's not from being nervous, so what the hell is it?

3 comments:

AutumnHeart said...

I think it's a left brain / right brain thing - I get it all the time if I've been doing a lot of really abstract or visual type of work - which includes coding. Interrupt me to ask a question when I've been working on a tricky threading problem and I'll appear to have the vocabulary of an 8 year old. It's like the ability to actually speak the words I'm thinking goes away - but oddly enough I can still write things down.

Insufficient resources to process all outputs, I guess :)

Not An Elf said...

I try to blame it on being too intelligent. There's so much going on inside this little nut that bits tend to dribble out the ears.

Good friends tend to say that there's something else dribbling.

In my itelligent systems stuff, I always noticed in the best systems there was a queen-worker-drone structure that would form as part of the iterations. In the absolute best systems, you could see an inherent redundancy develop. If our brains work that way, that could be it.

Maybe you just need to make like a tassie, or zaphod, and get a second head?

Not An Elf said...

Good to see posts BTW!!