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I’ve been thinking about memories for as long as I can remember. What I’m most interested in is the mixing phenomenon: the functionality that makes you feel sad when you hear a song, or makes you remember your childhood when you smell a certain food.
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1 year ago
The idea that memories are based on association has a long history. James Mill and John Stuart Mill were interested in association back in the 1800s. John Stuart Mill proposed that phenomena were associated based on laws of similarity, continguity and intensity, but later revised this to similarity, contiguity, frequency and inseparability (Boring, 1929, p. 229). In other words, similar items are associated with one another, things that occur together are associated, and so on.
Association is essentially a description of memory. The more vexing problem is to figure out how these associations are occurring in the brain.
Experimental evidence suggests that episodic memories are represented throughout the brain. The visual elements are stored, for example, in visual cortex and the emotional elements are in areas involved in emotion. It is not clear at the moment how all of this is coordinated into a single memory. The answer to this question is quite important to the study of consciousness, but it is difficult to study. Science tends to be well suited to breaking a complex phenomenon down into small parts but is not so well suited to seeing how all the small parts (the components of memory, in this case) combine to produce a larger phenomenon.
1 year ago
I've given this a bit more thought.
Discovering the fundamental processes of association would be the holy grail of psychology in many ways. Most psychological phenomena, like memory, learning, and cognition, could be viewed as examples of association. It would be very powerful if one process could explain such diverse functions.
Being a powerful idea, however, might also be a downside. The concept is so broad that it ends up being a bit vague. It wouldn't be specific enough to have much value. For example, if made a claim that all psychological processes are based on association it wouldn't really explain much in the end because it would be a catch-all type statement.