Why does association improve memory?

>>8579548
Evolution didn't really prepare us to memorize dry facts, numbers and whatever. Our memories are not made to store that kind of information. Our memories are meant to store only relevant stuff on very high abstraction levels. And those relevant things are not things we read, but things we actually experience and what we felt at the time (basically, data and labels). Our brains are basically constantly trying to figure out what the best decisions are in any situations and our memories are some kind of buffer for data collection. We usually only store shit that's either obviously relevant (the face of your angry mother shouting at you, some guy pointing a gun at you on the street), or things that deviate from the usual state, even if more or less unrelated to the experience (The slightly unusual way your gf parked her car before she broke up with you, that weird smell in the air when your brother told you he's going to marry his wife) etc. Those things are then used by the brain to figure shit out, sometimes we know, sometimes we don't, which is sometimes referred to as intuition.

Associating bare information with a story basically tricks our memories into fitting the information into a framework that's more suitable for us. If we do that, the brain's capacities are enormous.

>>8579597
Not OP, but this is actually an incredibly insightful and intuitive post, well done, anon, well done.

>>8579597
OP here thanks so much that was extremely helpful

>>8579597

I don't know psychology but my initial impulse was to suggest some pablum about mental connections (and even the image of the stuff in the brain, neurons, axons etc, whatever it is, being connected), perhaps something like connecting one abstract thing to something else that one actually cares about, which is what the FP did in a different way. But suggesting such pablum is in one sense just parroting OP's premise back to him and pretending that now it's an answer.

Still, associating an atomic fact that one doesn't personally care about with another atomic fact that one does personally care about would seem to make the former stick, by raising its status "by association". Despite not having a scientific answer for the science board, let me give a perfectly clear personal example that I use in a hobby of mine, and then generalize that example.

cont.

>>8579650

I have two hobbies. I like to follow the world news, however terrible it may be (I have a sadistic streak this way), and I also have been self-teaching myself a lot of geography over the past few years. countries, capitals, tectonic plates, flags, provinces, abandoned islands, and so on. The latter hobby is a long series of on-paper, dry, isolated, atomic facts that in some sense have no immediate relation to my personal life, globalism notwithstanding-I've never even been outside my home country.

Here is the best version of this, the object-lesson. Everyone knows Stonehenge, it's a meme, you can't avoid it. Stonehenge is somewhere in England, yet I personally never knew exactly where.

Unrelatedly, I once took it upon myself to memorize the counties of England. I repeatedly played this game https://www.sporcle.com/games/g/englandgeocounties until I had a pretty good command of most, but I'd miss things like Staffordshire, Leicestershire. I'd think of cheeses (Leicester?), sauces (Worcestershire), Abraham (Lincolnshire), The Shire, other Englishy-things I already knew just to get the names spit out. /associations/. But that fucker in the bottom left.

What was that fucker? FUCK. 47/48.

Wiltshire. Fucking Wiltshire, every time. I never get it.

In the course of this, I eventually looked up that Wiltshire is where Stonehenge is located.

I don't forget Wiltshire anymore. I had now permanently associated this abstract thing with something that people actually care about. Begging your pardon, but a meme made it stick.

I appreciate that in a sense I'm simply describing what OP is asking about, and not deeply explaining it, but I proceed:

I can now connect my knowledge of world history and the news, to these otherwise abstract bits of data. Continuing to pay attention helps. Sure enough, Conakry, Freetown and Monrovia are sure enough the capital cities of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, and this is reinforced by following the ebola crisis. And so on and so forth.

As the FPBP suggested, if we can tell a story, then it helps. We are storytellers (but WHYYYY, OP's question lingers.)

There are different types of memory and these types of memories that process, store and recall memory work differently depending on the type of memory.

However, there is a clear limitation that is not necessarily definable in a quantifiable value because it varies for each person: see cognitive overload. To overcome this process, 'chunking' can be used to break down larger ideas into smaller bits of information that can be remember more easily when associated with other ideas. If a twenty digit number is said all at once you may be able to remember a few of the values, which for the sake of the example might be the first 5 numbers and the last three because of cognitive overload it causes in your memory.

To overcome this to remember the number you can use chunking and associated as you may be able to imagine that you are walking through a house and are seeing items in a sequence representing the values in the number. It may 2 apples, 3 bananas and 4 oranges, then you see... and it goes go on. This is a process that cannot be learned instantly but is a way of adopting your thinking you chunk information into segment and remember those segments using associated of how it may be connected. A while after using this process or by changing your thinking style depending on your own preference will improve your ability to recall information in chunks.

I would look further into working memory and build from there if you are interested in learning how memory is created.