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Kominicki: Wasn’t there something I wanted to say?

Rick Perry’s brain freeze during the GOP presidential debates underscores three important points:

First, if he can’t remember the Department of Energy, he’s right, we probably don’t need it.

Second, momentary memory loss can happen to anyone, at any age and regardless of how well you’ve prepared your presentation.

For starters, let’s stop using the term “brain freeze” lest we confuse it with sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia, the condition caused by trying to inhale a Slurpee. That brain freeze is caused when excessive cold constricts the blood vessels on the roof of your mouth, and your body sends an alert to the brain using the nerves in your face, causing a headache-like rush of neurons.

Painful, yes, but not nearly as bad as standing with a blank look before a national television audience.

The momentary memory loss suffered by Perry is caused when the brain’s search engine – the hippocampus – starts surfing the frontal lobe for information and doesn’t readily find it for some reason. Researchers are still arguing the exact cause, but stress, lack of sleep and poor nutrition are contributors.

As your brain struggles to get the information, anxiety mounts, further slowing the search process. When full panic sets in, you’re toast: The body kicks into fight or flight mode, sending blood surging to your arm and leg muscles and all but shutting down the parts of your brain used for memory and verbal skills, which were not deemed especially vital in trying to outrun a velociraptor.

If you insist on a technical name for the condition, let’s go with lethologica, after Lethe, the mythological river in Hades that caused those who drank from it to lose their memories. You know it from words like lethargy and lethal. The ending is from logikos, which is related to logic, including all the “ology” fields of study.

It’s also the root of the word logorrhea, which is incoherent talkativeness, but, hey, we’re talking about Rick Perry, not George W. Bush.

Lethologica is also used to describe “tip of the tongue” forgetfulness, during which you struggle to come up with a word or name and just can’t. The psychologist William James, brother of Henry, famously compared it to being on the “brink of a sneeze” mentally.

TOT, as it’s known, has fascinated researchers since at least the late 1800s, when James first published on the condition, although mention of it dates back to Aristotle’s largely forgotten “On Memory and Reminiscence.” James noted two key elements: first, the inability to find the right word or name; second, the feeling that it’s about to come to you at any second.

In dating, it’s just called optimism.

Curiously, TOT sufferers can often come up with the first letter of the word or name, and sometimes fragments, without being able to express the target word. Others can conjure up related or rhyming words, even longer words or phrases that contain the missing target.

For example, you desperately try to remember the name of Bill, your attorney, but all you can think of is “billable hours.”

Tip of the tongue forgetfulness, especially as it affects the elderly, gainfully employs growing hordes of psychologists, psycholinguists and metacognitive experts, few of whom agree on anything.

One school, for example, argues that TOT occurs because the brain first conjures up the wrong word, which then blocks access to the correct word, causing what appears to be forgetfulness. Another group theorizes that the brain finds the word’s meaning semantically but fails to follow through with phonological capture, leaving you knowing exactly what you want to say but unable to say it.

Kind of like an argument with your boss.

Research suggests children begin to suffer from TOT as early as kindergarten, and that its likelihood grows with vocabulary and age. Recent studies suggest the elderly also remember less information about the target word and are generally less active in resolving the problem as it occurs.

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