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!
# posted by Dhaval @ 11:13 PM 
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Where does this 'association' begin from?
How does the human intelligence evolve from being nothing to what you mention in the post?
If 'association' is all it takes, what is creativity/fantasy?
How does the human intelligence evolve from being nothing to what you mention in the post?
If 'association' is all it takes, what is creativity/fantasy?
ah.. good question... certainly a food for thought!
As I mentioned, we always tend to associate newly learnt things to some stronger concepts already learnt. However, there seems to be a way of strengthening any concept learnt: thats by refreshing it. For example, a child learns about its mother very early in its growth. But the concept of a mother becomes stronger because it gets refreshed almost everyday(maybe every minute initially). Of course, that explains why a child separated from its mom does not recognise her after several years.
Thats how human intelligence evolves! Strengthening concepts newly learnt by refreshing them or associating newly learnt concepts with stronger ones.
Note: Even such 'refreshing' of concepts can be explained using the association principle. Whenever you learn a new concept, you make an image of it in your mind. Then, everytime it is refreshed, you associate the 'input' with this image. If it matches, the concept gets stronger.
Next, how do you explain creativity/fantasy?
Well, courtesy wikipedia, 'creativity' is defined as "a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts."
The later part of the sentence directly suppports the association principle (fortunately, it also uses the same words I have used :P). So, let us try and analyse the former part. How does the 'generation' of new ideas take place? For that, lets take an example of one of the most creative works in history: The Painting of Mona-Lisa. How do you think did Leonardo-da-Vinci paint it? Did he not have some image in his mind before starting to paint? Say, he must have started with the image of a woman (or maybe himself, as many theorists claim) and then, maybe thought of imparting some unique qualities to it.
So, creativity is, according to me, a measure of how well and to what degree you can bend, skew and blend already exsisting concepts. But nevertheless, it all starts with association.
And what about imagination or fantasy? Well, the name itself suggests, isnt it - imagination - image formation in the brain! When we 'imagine', we gather concepts to form an image in the brain, though during imagination, we don't associate it with real-world entities. But if we are able to create something based on such an image, we call it creativity! In fact, imagination is the first step in the process of creativity that I just described!
Hope that was fine.. :)
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As I mentioned, we always tend to associate newly learnt things to some stronger concepts already learnt. However, there seems to be a way of strengthening any concept learnt: thats by refreshing it. For example, a child learns about its mother very early in its growth. But the concept of a mother becomes stronger because it gets refreshed almost everyday(maybe every minute initially). Of course, that explains why a child separated from its mom does not recognise her after several years.
Thats how human intelligence evolves! Strengthening concepts newly learnt by refreshing them or associating newly learnt concepts with stronger ones.
Note: Even such 'refreshing' of concepts can be explained using the association principle. Whenever you learn a new concept, you make an image of it in your mind. Then, everytime it is refreshed, you associate the 'input' with this image. If it matches, the concept gets stronger.
Next, how do you explain creativity/fantasy?
Well, courtesy wikipedia, 'creativity' is defined as "a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts."
The later part of the sentence directly suppports the association principle (fortunately, it also uses the same words I have used :P). So, let us try and analyse the former part. How does the 'generation' of new ideas take place? For that, lets take an example of one of the most creative works in history: The Painting of Mona-Lisa. How do you think did Leonardo-da-Vinci paint it? Did he not have some image in his mind before starting to paint? Say, he must have started with the image of a woman (or maybe himself, as many theorists claim) and then, maybe thought of imparting some unique qualities to it.
So, creativity is, according to me, a measure of how well and to what degree you can bend, skew and blend already exsisting concepts. But nevertheless, it all starts with association.
And what about imagination or fantasy? Well, the name itself suggests, isnt it - imagination - image formation in the brain! When we 'imagine', we gather concepts to form an image in the brain, though during imagination, we don't associate it with real-world entities. But if we are able to create something based on such an image, we call it creativity! In fact, imagination is the first step in the process of creativity that I just described!
Hope that was fine.. :)
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