LAW OF ASSOCIATION

According to this law, any information can get registered in our brain only if it can be associated or linked with any of the prior information already present in our memory.

In fact, all learning till date can be attributed to this law of association. Most of the

things you remember have been associated subconsciously with something else that you already knew.

For example, we all know what a line is. If we put four lines of equal length together, end to end, to form a closed figure, we make a square. If we put six squares together, the result will be a cube. Quite simple, but nobody can understand the

meaning of a cube without knowing what a line or a square is.

What is true in Geometry is true in every phase of life. We learn and remember a thing that is new to us only by connecting it with something that we already know.

There is no other way of acquiring knowledge and we have been doing this throughout our life. We may not always be aware of this process, but we make associations

regularly.

Association means linking what you want to remember with something you already know.

In fact, our brain always stores information in the form of associations or

connections. Whenever a stimulus comes from outside, it recalls the connection. For example, you are thinking about your school friend. Immediately, you will be

reminded of many things associated with your friend like the time you spent together, your school, classroom, class teacher, etc. Similarly, when we think about a bird, along with it we are reminded of nest, eggs, sky, and tree.

Can you think of any one thing to which no other information is related? According to scientists this is impossible since our brain can memorize information only in pairs.

For example, if someone asks you to memorize a random date like 18^th February, 1985, it is illogical for us to memorize it. When this date gets associated with the name of any person or event, we can then memorize it. This is because our brain

memorizes only connections and for connecting, we need two elements of information.

Given below are some examples from a simple word association game that children often play for amusement:

Rain Water

Thus we find that we instantly recall something after having read a particular word, although we may not have thought about that thing for months. You can easily find an association or relation between the given word and the respective answer.

Now try it for yourself. Write down what comes to your mind immediately after reading the following words:

Sachin Tendulkar _______

Books ________________

Pen __________________

Window _______________

Cup __________________

Party _________________

Association simply means that when one word or idea is presented, another word or idea, with which the first word is connected, is recalled.

Try to recall the list of 15 words you memorized in the beginning of this chapter, starting from Ant, and write all of them in the space given below:

I am sure you have successfully recalled nearly all of them in the same sequence.

Now let’s play a little trick!

Try to recall and write what was after elephant:________

Now check if you can correctly tell what was before elephant:________

Write what is after dragon:________

Once you have written your answers, refer to the list and check. I am sure all your answers are correct.

Whether I ask you something from the middle of the list or from the end, you are

able to answer it so fast because when I ask elephant, it is linked to paintbrush in the forward order and is associated with mobile in the reverse order. The moment I give you one information, the other one connected to it is recalled automatically without any effort of going into the sequence of the whole list.

A

P

N

If I have a fist full of pearls and I put them on a table, chances are that they will get scattered here and there. Some of them might roll down the edge of the table and disappear. Some might remain on the table, constantly changing their

position. After five minutes, it would be difficult for me to collect all of them in my hand. But if I put all these pearls in a string and tie a knot and place it on the table, all the pearls will remain in the same place, making it easy for me to pick them up, wear them, use them, and place them back in my drawer without losing any of the pearls.

Associating information with each other is quite similar to putting pearls in a string. Initially, when I asked you to memorize the list, most of you might have been able to recall the first 2–3 words or the last few ones, but not the ones in the middle. That’s because all words were scattered in the memory like pearls on a table. But through association, we connected the first word with the second, then second with third and so on, so the information is secured in your memory. That is why even now you can recall any word from the list in the correct sequence.

That is the beauty of association.

We have been using this association technique consciously in some ways earlier also. For example, most of us must have used the famous phrase—‘My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Noodles’ to memorize the sequence of eight planets in our solar system through the initials of the words (i.e. Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune).

Many a times we are not able to make an association of all the information required to remember. In this book you are going to learn how to associate anything you want to remember, and the wonderful part about the whole thing is that after using this system consciously for a while, you will automatically start using it as a natural process.