What Is Associative Memory?

The mechanism that causes these mental events has been known for a long time. The british philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries searched for the rules that explain such sequences. Psychologists think of ideas as nodes in a vast network called associative memory, in which each idea is linked to many others. Most of the work of associativ thinking is silent, hidden from our conscious selves. You know far less about yourself than you feel. We no longer think of the mind as going through a sequence of conscious ideas, one at a time.