Metaknowledge

You know when someone asks you who played Sam in Lord of the Rings?

You don't remember it instantly, but you get a little 'tickle', and you say something like…

“Oh, hang on, I know this…it's um… wait a minute… it's that blond guy… it's on the tip of my tongue…”

Even though you couldn’t remember the fact itself, that 'tickle' tells you that you 'know that you know'.

This fascinates me. It's almost as if the brain has an index of what you know. Of course, this goes against modern neuroscience, which suggests there are no centralised architectures such as a 'database of everything you know'.

It's not a binary 'tickle' either. It runs from 'that sounds vaguely familiar’ to 'I'm 100% certain I know that and it's really annoying me that I can’t remember it'.

I've decided to call this 'tickle' metaknowledge (I'm sure it has an actual proper name) and I'll be looking into it some more in the next couple of weeks…

How can this work? Has anyone started studying it? Does it use the same pathways as information recall or is there a separate system? How often does it fail, that you think you know something you don't, or vice versa? Why?

I'm reminded of Borges's Library of Babel. Our metaknowledge is our guide to where the books are kept.

Any thoughts on this?

PS - it's Sean Astin, btw.