All people have the ability to think with the help of associations and regularly use it in everyday life, but not everyone knows how to develop associative thinking. What associations are and how to improve associative memory with the help of exercises will be discussed in this article.

Associative Thinking: What is it?

Associative thinking is a kind of thought process based on connections between words, that is, associations.

Connections can arise between objects, events, facts, information about which is stored in a person's memory. For example, if you pronounce the word “mimosa”, then many people will think about the holiday of March 8 or about the famous salad, and the word “tangerine” most often evokes sweet memories of the wonderful New Year holiday. Such memories are called associations, which depend on the experience of a particular person.

In psychology, associations are divided into several subspecies:

1. Contrasting or opposite (morning-evening).
2. Similar or similar (stove - microwave).
3. Generalized (cucumber - vegetable, jacket - clothes).
4. Adjacent in space and time (winter - cold).
5. Causal by (clouds - rain).
6. Thematic (cough - illness).
7. Derivational, appearing on the basis of a single root of words (horror - creepy).
8. Phonetic, caused by the consonance of words (daughter-night).

Associative thinking is very useful for solving a wide variety of problems, they stimulate mental activity. Connections between concepts are manifested not only in the form of words, for many people they appear in the form of images, smells, sounds. It all depends on who the person is (auditory, visual, kinesthetic).

All people remember information differently. It is easier for some to remember what they see, others need to write down information on paper, and others need to listen to it. Every healthy person has the ability to create associative series. But there is such a thing as "associative disorder". This is a mental illness in which a person cannot build a consistent series of related terms in his mind.

The training of the thinking process, built on the connection of concepts, helps to make new discoveries, generate new ideas, and improve the memorization of new material. Thus, the associative method is the basis of T. Buzan's quick memorization system. To consolidate new information in memory, you need to correlate it with already familiar objects.

Our memory is so arranged that related concepts are much easier to remember. If you need to remember some new word, you should associate it with a familiar word by consonance or other criteria. So new knowledge is tied to the basic one, which is already firmly entrenched in the human brain. This is how associative memory works.

IMPORTANT! By establishing links between words, images, concepts, memory develops during the thought process and ideas are generated. This is very useful for creative people, pioneers of new laws in all areas of scientific and creative activity.

Workout Exercises

The thought process itself, through the construction of an associative series, is directly related to creativity, so it is simply necessary to develop it. At a young age, he is very well developed.

Toddlers, as a rule, perfectly play with words, create non-trivial connections between them, which helps them learn new knowledge. The development of associative thinking stimulates creativity, so it is also useful for adults to learn to memorize information using words related to each other.

Specialists have developed special exercises that not only help improve thinking processes in adults and children, but also contribute to vocabulary replenishment and the development of literate speech. They are quite simple, you can do them throughout the day.

The most effective developmental exercises:

1. association chain. You need to come up with two completely different words. You should build a chain of words between them that will connect them. For example, the original words are bark and car. The chain will look like this: barking-dog-owner-man-machine.
2. Beginning of associations. You should come up with a word that will serve as the beginning of an associative chain. And then you will need to select words to it in order to continue the chain. For example, coffee - aroma - arabica coffee - robusta - cream - sugar.
3. general association. This task assumes the presence of two words, to which you need to come up with associations that connect them both. For example, warm, yellow. It can be sand, sun, fire.
4. associated association. Invent two words and match them with others that have a connection in one or more ways. For example, the source codes are the words cold and bright. Related terms could be ice, light, ice cream.
5. Reveal the secret of the drudles. This exercise boils down to describing a picture that shows a kind of scribbles, but they initially contain the variability of perception. The picture can have many interpretations and perfectly trains the thinking process.
6. Non-trivial association. To the invented term, you need to pick up an extraordinary association. For example, after hearing the word "CD", the first thing that comes to mind for most people is music or a movie. But CDs can be used to decorate the Christmas tree, for crafts. So the association can be called the word "craft" or "tree".

So, associative memory is necessary in order to remember the necessary information and keep it in memory for a long time. There is nothing difficult in creating an associative series, you just need to take into account that the association should be bright, unusual, interesting. Training based on associative thinking exercises has a very good effect on the development of creative abilities and imagination. She helps

If we talk about creating an intellectual base for the successful learning of a child (including for fast reading), then we cannot ignore associative thinking. Today I offer you material about associative thinking, about what significance it has in life, and how it affects the development of a child. And what to do if it is poorly developed or not developed at all.

The thing is that our memory and thinking are associative. Have you noticed that a certain word or expression or smell or action triggers certain memories.

For example, you are walking down the street and you smell a freshly baked pie. Immediately, memories of the house, of my mother who baked pies as a child, of tea drinking, perhaps of friends, and many other things arise in the mind. This is what associations are.

The selection of associations awakens a lot of information in memory, which has a positive effect on almost all sides of the mind. Associative thinking beneficial effect on the speed and productivity of thought processes. This is a very good training for the mind, it is not without reason that associative thinking is called the thinking of geniuses. Thanks to him, a person (including a child) becomes capable of creating

1. new original ideas
2. semantic connections.

Develops and rises to a new level of imagination, intuition.

Associative thinking is a special kind of thinking. It is not news that humans have two hemispheres. Everyone has their own task. The left thinks in words, the right thinks in images. So associative thinking connects their activities into something unified. And this results in a completely new quality, which is also very useful for development.

Associations are of great importance for the development of memory. Each time they raise from its bottom a lot of all sorts of information that seemed to have been forgotten a long time ago, and thus activate the processes of remembering and reproducing information. And besides this, the active vocabulary of the child is significantly expanded.

Before school, it is useful to check if your baby can create associations.

Associative Thinking Test

Let's take 30 words familiar to the child: ten denoting objects (nouns), ten actions (any verbs), and ten qualities (adjectives). Let's mix them up and write them in a column so that there is a place to the right of the word where the child's answers will be recorded.

Words (approximate set): sun, fast, boy, wolf, draw, high, fast, sing, bed, angry, fly, glass, table, laugh, forest, cold, friend, apple, jump, book, red, grow, house, cheerful, water, brother, wide.

See where the child is having the most difficulty: spending a lot of time, unable to find a word, etc. This is where you need to work.

If the child is at a loss, then this can be for three reasons:

1. did not understand the task;
2. does not know how to find associations;
3. afraid to speak his mind.

The quality of the responses can be divided into two groups.

Higher speech reactions:

1. when a qualitative characteristic of an object is given: answers like the sun is round, (yellow, warms), glass - water, red - blue;
2. in response to the word, the child names a generic concept: table - furniture, apple - fruit;
3. the answer is in contrast: laugh - cry, cheerful - sad, forest - field.

Lower speech reactions:

1. instead of answering, the child asks the question: apple - "where?" "which?" (such answers are called indicative);
2. refusal answers: "I don't know";
3. consonant: like "brother - take";
4. responds to 2, 3 or more words with the same, for example, his name;
5. simply repeats the presented word: "house - house" or calls the plural "house - houses".

Association training

Associations can and should be trained. For a preschooler, the following game will be useful.

Give the child the following instruction: "I will say the word, and in response you say the first word that you remember (or that comes to mind)." Say the words one by one. Looks like a "question and answer"

For example:

1. window, table, shoes, sea, girl, house, bird, dishes, tree, pencil, butterfly, dog, scoop, cucumber, plane, salt, grass, cow, rainbow, cloud, sofa, hare, flower;
2. standing, talking, drinking, growing, singing, sewing, drawing, running, laughing, falling, making friends, getting off;
3. royal, yellow, big, cold, tall, fat, windy, good, angry, wooden, fox;
4. quickly, lightly, incorrectly, late, angrily, dryly, high, diligently, cheerfully.

All these words can be mixed so that the child's brain constantly switches. This is useful, as important qualities of the mind are formed: switching and distribution of attention. To find words for presentation, use a spelling or other dictionary.

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The main role of associations in memorization is that we link new knowledge to information we already know. To build a good association, you need to know some useful criteria for finding a connection between things, as well as develop your associative thinking and creative imagination. It is equally important to learn how to build associative series and connections to stimulate figurative memory. This lesson will show you how to use the method of building associations to remember information.

What are associations?

Association- this is a connection between individual facts, events, objects or phenomena reflected in the mind of a person and fixed in his memory. Associative perception and human thinking lead to the fact that the appearance of one element, under certain conditions, causes the image of another associated with it.

The ability to build associations is the most important ability of our mind. There is even such a direction: associative psychology (or associationism), which tries to explain the mental processes of a person by studying his associations in connection with certain objects (stimulus - reaction), the process of remembering information can also be considered from this point of view.

Association types

To find associations, there are several ways to build associative links between any objects:

1. Adjacency in time or space: table and chair, winter and snow;
2. Similarity (similarity): earth and ball, lamp and pear;
3. Contrast (opposite): good and evil, black and white;
4. Causal relationships: thunder and lightning, lamp and light;
5. Generalization: tomato and vegetable, dog and animal;
6. Subordination: vegetable and cucumber, animal and cat;
7. Subordination to one object: car and motorcycle;
8. Part and whole: seconds and minute, car and engine;
9. Addition: toothpaste and toothbrush.

Depending on the application of these methods, as well as on various modifications and conditions for their use, different types of associations can be found. For example, associations are:

• thematic, in which objects are connected by a single theme (marketing and advertising);
• phonetic, in which there is consonance between objects (lie and rye, night and daughter);
• derivational, based on the unity of the root or other parts of the word (laziness and being lazy).

It should be noted that the associative processes taking place in our minds depend on the degree of participation of different sensory organs in them. So allocate visual, auditory, kinesthetic, gustatory and olfactory associations. Depending on the predisposition of a person, the characteristics of his sensory representational system, it will be useful for him to build associations that are suitable for him.

Someone has a motor memory, like Napoleon (who wrote down each new name three times, threw away the note and remembered this name forever). Someone, due to their developed auditory memory, prefers to pronounce information aloud. The basis of memory for people tuned to visual perception (and most of them) is, for example, the purposeful selection of key words in the memorized text (underlining, coloring, creating diagrams and drawings).

With the development of memory techniques, people have already developed associative techniques that are suitable for most of us. These techniques are called mnemonics, and they will be discussed in one of the following lessons.

How to develop associative thinking?

Despite the fact that today there are many mnemonics that facilitate the construction of associations for remembering various kinds of information, there is no universal technique that would be suitable for all cases. Often you have to create associations and systematize material for memorization on your own. Not everyone is good at associative memory, but this can be learned. Associative thinking is built, first of all, on our creative abilities, namely, on the ability to create something new by modifying the existing one.

The development of associative thinking is closely connected with the imagination and the ability of a person to find similar elements even in the most diverse things, as well as with the training of figurative memory. On our website there is a special lesson on the development of imagination in the course of creative thinking. You can read this lesson by clicking on the link.

In addition, the expansion of the range of associations can be achieved through targeted training. Below we offer you some simple exercises:

Exercises

Exercise 2. Drawing up a chain of associations. Choose any word and start building a chain of associations from it, writing them down on paper. Try to write down the associations as quickly as possible, and make the connections as unusual as possible.

Exercise 3. Search for missing associations. Choose any two words or phrases that should have as little in common as possible. Try to build an association that connects these two words. For example, for the words "morning" and "food", the element that complements the associative array will be the word "breakfast". Try to find the missing link for the words: movie and dream, elevator and car, flower and skyscraper.

Exercise 4. Suitable associations. Choose two words, and try to name associations that are suitable for each of these words at the same time. For example, for the words "white" and "light" one can name such associations: snow, fluff, feather, etc. To complicate the exercise, you can choose not two, but three or even more words.

Exercise 5. Unusual associations. For the development of associative thinking in order to better remember, it is useful to be able to look for the most vivid and non-standard associations. In this case, the image will be better fixed in memory. Most people for these words and phrases will name the following associations:

• Russian poet - Pushkin
• Poultry - chicken
• Fruit - apple
• Part of the face - nose

Try to come up with other, less popular associations with the same words.

Exercise 6. Drawing up mental maps. Mind maps are a useful exercise for developing associative memory. One of the creators of the idea of ​​compiling such maps, Tony Buzan, in his book "Supermemory" wrote that "... if you want to remember something new, you just need to correlate it with some already known fact, calling on your imagination to help." You can read more about the method of compiling mental maps consisting of associative series in the next lesson on memory development.

If you do at least part of these exercises for 10-15 minutes a day, then in a few days the training will become easier and more exciting, and most importantly, you will be able to memorize any new material faster.

For the development of associative thinking in order to improve the memorization of the material, it is also useful to use the following recommendations. The association must:

1. arouse genuine interest in you (how to achieve this was written in the previous lesson);
2. affect various sense organs;
3. be unusual, but meaningful to you;
4. contain the most detailed picture (size, color, etc.).

And most importantly - that the association was bright and easy to remember.

So the second rule of thumb is:

To remember certain information well, find suitable bright associations that will be an indispensable assistant in the process of representation (reproduction of information).

Test your knowledge

If you want to test your knowledge on the topic of this lesson, you can take a short test consisting of several questions. Only 1 option can be correct for each question. After you select one of the options, the system automatically moves on to the next question. The points you receive are affected by the correctness of your answers and the time spent on passing. Please note that the questions are different each time, and the options are shuffled.

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"Associative thinking in the development of memory"

In order to better remember the necessary information and keep it in memory longer, it is good to find vivid memorable associations. Using them will help you more fully reproduce information at the right time. The creation of associations is a creative process, but there is nothing complicated, let alone impossible, in it. First of all, let's agree that there are a few rules to learn:

• Association should be interesting.
• The association must be unusual.
• The association should be as detailed as possible.

And now a little more. So, what is an association in general and how it can contribute to the memorization of information.

Association(lat. Association- connection, relationship) - in psychology and philosophy, a naturally occurring connection between individual events, facts, objects or phenomena reflected in consciousness and fixed in memory.

Ideas about the relationship of objects in the imagination developed back in ancient philosophy (Aristotle, Plato), but the term “association” itself was introduced in 1698 by J. Locke to denote the relationship between ideas caused by a random combination of circumstances.

We see an object, the subconscious mind analyzes it, and the imagination synthesizes something similar (generally analyzes the object, circumstances), which was encountered earlier or in a similar situation. A set of associative concepts is formed throughout life, because based on the life experience of each of us.

We all use associations, although we often don't think about it. For example, with the word New Year, someone will first of all think about a beautiful Christmas tree decorated with balls, someone about fluffy snow, someone about gifts or the smell of tangerines. All associations can be combined into several groups:

• similarity associations: globe-ball,
• associations by contrast: big-small, black-white,
• associations by contiguity in space or time: spring-flowering, autumn-rain,
• causal associations: day-light, night-dark.

In addition to the main types of associations, you can use:

• generalization: chamomile-flowers,
• subordination: chamomile flowers,
• part and whole: second-minute,
• addition: pen paper.

When studying a large amount of material, the use of associations makes it possible to form semantic connections between objects, it is easier to move from one point to another, to memorize and recall information. To memorize something new, you need to compare it with this or that event, the image, the experience gained earlier, the knowledge we have. It must be said that different images of feelings participate in the construction of associations. One remembers better by writing down information (tactile memory), the other by saying it out loud (auditory), the third by highlighting key words, drawing diagrams (visual), etc. For the development of associative thinking, you need to find similar elements in various things and train figurative memory, using the features of your sensory representational system. The existing simple exercises will help you expand the circle of association, develop imagination and associative thinking.

Exercise 1 "Chain of associations"

We take any word and write down a number of associations for it: ticket-cinema-friends-walk-course-institute. Over time, increase the speed of inventing associations.

Exercise 2 "Filling the Gap"

We take two words that have a minimum in common with each other and fill the gap between them with associative words. For example, a pencil and a diploma. Intermediate words can be: pencil-class-study-diploma.

Exercise 3 Multiple Associations

We take a few words and select associations suitable for each of them. You can start with two words, then add a few more to them. For example, rectangular, brown. You can pick up words for them: bread, brick, etc.

Exercise 4 Non-standard associations

There are associations that come to the mind of the majority, for example, a closet - clothes, football - a ball, a face - eyes. Come up with unusual associations for them, which will contribute to better memorization.
If you give exercises 10-15 minutes a day, then the associations will become brighter and more interesting each time, and it will be easier and easier to come up with them, in the end you will memorize any new material faster and for a long time.