Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Hallmark Of Intelligence
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Human memory is associative. Anything that we remember, is stored as an association with some concept already discovered by us. Isn't it true? Say, you want to set your email account password. Why do you choose the name of your child or spouse? Or some known concept? It is because you associate the password with these concepts. And most of us, subconsciously choose the concepts which are strong enough to remember.
It is like this: If you want to remember a concept A, you associate it with a concept B. And the strength of your memory of A depends on the strength of your memory of B. If memory of B is weak, so would be the memory of A.
This is why you choose your loved one's name, isn't it? Whose name can you remember easily - that of the clerk in your office or that of your spouse? Isn't it obvious that we use the associativity rule everyday in our life?
I just walked in through the door talking over phone to a friend who asked me to meet him in room 212.
I quickly thought how to remember it: 212 is a palindrome number!
Then, in a while, I realized what I had just done. I had associated that room number with all palindrome strings that I had studied long back!
Lets analyze this further. Why did I not take the property of 212 being divisible by 2 to remember it? Because it involves calculations! Human mind would rather prefer to associate than to calculate. Looking at the number (i.e. associating it with its image I have formed in my mind), I can also associate the first '2' with the last one - something I cannot do with the divisibility property.
What happens when you meet someone you have already met? You associate the person with his pre-made image in your mind. Thats why you are in splits when the person changes his appearance suddenly, say, shaves his mustache or goes bald. You do not find a 100% match of the image that you have in mind and what you have just seen. In some cases, you may not even recognize the person.
This also explains why you take time to recognize a person at a distance. Its because you are reasoning with yourself whether this person is similar to the image in you have mind.
Though no one seems to have understood which part of the brain does this associative matchmaking, it is quite clear that this property of individuals imparts intelligence to humans. The better and faster the process, the more intelligent you are.
-Dhaval
Note: This post has recently been published in the hostel magazine of H-1, IIT Bombay too!
Human memory is associative. Anything that we remember, is stored as an association with some concept already discovered by us. Isn't it true? Say, you want to set your email account password. Why do you choose the name of your child or spouse? Or some known concept? It is because you associate the password with these concepts. And most of us, subconsciously choose the concepts which are strong enough to remember.
It is like this: If you want to remember a concept A, you associate it with a concept B. And the strength of your memory of A depends on the strength of your memory of B. If memory of B is weak, so would be the memory of A.
This is why you choose your loved one's name, isn't it? Whose name can you remember easily - that of the clerk in your office or that of your spouse? Isn't it obvious that we use the associativity rule everyday in our life?
I just walked in through the door talking over phone to a friend who asked me to meet him in room 212.
I quickly thought how to remember it: 212 is a palindrome number!
Then, in a while, I realized what I had just done. I had associated that room number with all palindrome strings that I had studied long back!
Lets analyze this further. Why did I not take the property of 212 being divisible by 2 to remember it? Because it involves calculations! Human mind would rather prefer to associate than to calculate. Looking at the number (i.e. associating it with its image I have formed in my mind), I can also associate the first '2' with the last one - something I cannot do with the divisibility property.
What happens when you meet someone you have already met? You associate the person with his pre-made image in your mind. Thats why you are in splits when the person changes his appearance suddenly, say, shaves his mustache or goes bald. You do not find a 100% match of the image that you have in mind and what you have just seen. In some cases, you may not even recognize the person.
This also explains why you take time to recognize a person at a distance. Its because you are reasoning with yourself whether this person is similar to the image in you have mind.
Though no one seems to have understood which part of the brain does this associative matchmaking, it is quite clear that this property of individuals imparts intelligence to humans. The better and faster the process, the more intelligent you are.
-Dhaval
Note: This post has recently been published in the hostel magazine of H-1, IIT Bombay too!
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