The Associative Machine

Listen to the following words, bananas vomit. Your face twisted slightly in an expression of disgust and you may have shifted imperceptibly farther away. The events that took place as a result of your seeing the words happened by a process called associative activation. Ideas that have been evoked trigger many other ideas in a spreading cascade of activity in your brain. All this happens quickly and all at once, yielding a self reinforcing pattern of cognitive, emotional and physical responses which is both diverse and integrated. It has been called associatively coherent.