Associative Thinking

category

Associative thinking is the cognitive process by which concepts activate related concepts through the spreading activation of semantic networks — the mental movement from one idea to another through chains of associative links that include semantic similarity, causal relationships, spatial contiguity, temporal co-occurrence, phonological resemblance, and the idiosyncratic personal associations formed by individual experience. Highly creative individuals characteristically have broader, more loosely coupled associative networks that allow activation to spread further from an initial concept, reaching more remote and unexpected associations than the tightly constrained networks that characterize more analytical thinking styles.

Role

Associative thinking is the cognitive substrate of creative insight — with the neurological research on the default mode network establishing that the brain's spontaneous associative activity during states of relaxed attention is the mechanism through which the most remote and most original connections are formed. The tragedy of contemporary attentional life is that the constant external stimulation of digital media systematically suppresses the default mode network's spontaneous activity by keeping the brain in externally directed, stimulus-responsive mode rather than the internally directed, associatively generative mode in which creative connections form. The deliberate protection of idle, associatively open mental time — the shower, the walk, the daydream — is not laziness but the specific cognitive hygiene that creative thinking requires.

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References

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