Memory Expansion for Associations

topic

Associative memory expansion is the deliberate building of a richly interconnected long-term memory store — through spaced repetition, interleaved learning, elaborative encoding, and the formation of explicit connections between new information and existing knowledge — that provides the dense, cross-domain associative network from which the most productive creative connections can be formed. The richness of a person's associative network is directly proportional to the richness of their long-term memory and the density of the connections between its elements.

Role

Associative memory expansion is the input-side prerequisite for creative connection-making — because connections can only be formed between memory elements that exist in the network, and the remoteness of the connections that can be formed is limited by the domain diversity of what the network contains. Most people's memory is both smaller than it could be (information consumed without effective encoding) and less densely connected than it could be (information stored in domain-specific silos without the cross-domain connections that would enable creative transfer). Deliberate memory expansion through effective encoding practices combined with deliberate cross-domain connection formation during encoding produces the rich, densely interconnected associative network that highly creative thinking draws from.

Explore "Memory Expansion for Associations" on the interactive map →