Describing obscure mental phenomena

Something I find incredibly interesting is making an attempt to describe (as precisely as possible) particular mental phenomena that we have all encountered, that are rarely ever talked about and that are difficult to put our fingers on.

One such phenomenon that I was discussing with my parents today is embodied by the following rough set of circumstances:

You see a face on TV, you hear a song on the radio, you are describing a familiar concept and a vital piece of data is escaping you: a name, an artist, a word. You know that, filed somewhere in your cognitive library, the piece of data that you want is there--waiting for you. But you forget the way to find it. You're having a mental block!

This experience is common enough and not all that interesting on its own. What is more interesting is what sometimes happens as follows:

You give up trying different combinations of keywords in your mental search engine. You give up trying to figure out that person's name or the word that is eluding you. Later--perhaps much later--you witness someone else experiencing the mental frustration of a missing piece of data. You seeing them struggle, somehow works as a trigger for your unrelated, lost piece of data from earlier, and you blurt out "Splinter!" or whatever it is you were looking for.

So, the circumstance I'm describing may be a special case of the more generalized experience of finally having the elusive word or name come to you after having given up, relaxing and letting your mind move onto something else. I've had many times when I come up with the data in question simply 'out of nowhere'.

But is there something special about the experience of watching someone else search that will declutter the search channels in our own minds and allow us to reach out and grasp the piece of data we are, seemingly, not even looking for anymore?

A topic for another post, I think, will be to investigate a little more, some theories about modeling the mind on a search engine and what sort of analogies we could come up with in the digital world that would describe this sort of mental block on labels.