The Association of Ideas

Psychologists think of ideas as nodes in a vast network called associative memory. In the 1980s, psychologists discovered that exposure to a word causes immediate and measurable changes in the ease with which many related words can be evoked. If you have recently seen or heard the word eat, you are temporarily more likely to complete the word fragment, SO blank P, as soup, than as soap. We call this a priming effect, and say that the idea of eat primes the idea of soup, and that wash primes soap. The notion that we have limited access to the workings of our minds is difficult to accept because it is alien to our experience. You know far less about yourself