THE SECRET OF CLOSED MINDS?
In the last few days I have been playing with the idea of memory.
Associative memory is an old idea, and it has been used in attempts to give useful memory to AI. In fact, a quick Google on the term will find a huge number of computer science-related hits. But the basic idea is that of free association. If I say "dog," you associate the word with "hairy," "barks," "teeth," "pants," "drools," and "sniffs butts" (among other things). The list of associations amounts to a definition of "dog."
In my own mind, I think of an idea as a sort of blobject with hooks:
I think of my brain as containing a rack from which a few ideas can be hung. Then other ideas are hung from them.
The more ideas I have in my mind, the more hooks are available for hanging more ideas and the easier it is to learn new things.
But some people don't seem to be able to learn new things better as they get older. It is as if the hooks on their ideas are tangled, or as if the ideas are installed upside down, which might match up with circular thinking. (God created life; the existence of life proves the existence of God; do you know anyone who thinks that way?).
What I like about this graphic metaphor for memory is that it just might explain the difference between open minds and closed minds in a useful way. What do you think?
posted by Tom Easton @ 6:20 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
This is an interesting metaphor for memory and knowledge storage. The usefulness is particularly apparent when it comes to the issue of infantile amnesia, the phenomenon of failure to recall events from the first two or three years of life. Within your framework, infants have insufficient hooks in their system on which to hang new information. It isn't until some critical mass is reached at 3 or 4 years of age that an efficient knowledge system is in place.
On the other hand, I'm not so sure this explains closed minds. I tend to think of closed minded people as individuals whose knowledge exists in isolation; that is, the interconnectedness is absent. Tangled hooks would almost seem to represent the creative thinker. The individual who somehow merges and tangles the concepts of economics and strategy games emerges with a new, useful, and insightful concept-game theory much in the same way that a creative individual might merge their love of fishing and their fascination with the human mind to yeild blobjects!
Re closed minds and tangled hooks--my point is that tangling reduces the number of hooks available for new items. The creative mind I would suggest has cross connections, to be sure, but not so many that new ideas cannot be stored. And in fact some creative people do seem unable to learn new stuff well, even as they are quite good at combining old ideas. (I wonder if they have trouble remembering what they came up with?)
Post a Comment
<< Home