"Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches." - Joshua Foer
Being able to access any memory regardless of where it is stored is called random access. DVDs and hard drives work this way—you can jump to any spot in a movie or hard drive by “pointing” at it. Videotapes do not. To get to a particular scene on a tape, you need to go through every previous point first (sequential access).
Our ability to randomly access our memories from multiple cues is extremely powerful. If you’re into computer science, it might help to view human memory as a kind of relational database.
Having relational memory means that if I want to get you to think of a police car, I can induce the memory in many different ways. I might make the sound of a siren, or give a verbal description (“a sedan used by cops to enable them to respond to crime”). I might try to trigger the concept by an association game, by asking you to identify what the Ford Crown Victoria, the Chevrolet Suburban, and the Dodge Charger all have in common (most people realize quickly that these are all common types of police vehicles). All of these things and more are attributes of the police car: its blackness, its emergency vehicle-ness, its speed, the fact that uniformed men and women drive it, that its doors are bullet-resistant.
If the end of that last sentence got you thinking about what other vehicles have fortified exteriors (for example, armed trucks at the bank or SWAT vans), you have discovered a fascinating concept: we can categorize objects into many, and seemingly infinite, ways. And any one of the cues we’ve discussed has its route to the neural representation of police car in your brain.
In addition to neural patches in the brain that represent attributes of things, those attributes are also connected to other things. A police car is black, but so are many things: ants, dress shoes, belts, tires, black Labrador retrievers—it’s pretty easy to keep going. The reason you can think of all those objects easily is because when you think of black, you’re sending electrical signals through the network and down the branches to everything else in your brain that connects to it, which even includes concepts associated with the color black, like darkness, evil and mourning.
A key to understanding the mind is that on its own, it doesn’t organize things the way you might want it to. It’s enormously powerful and flexible, but it’s not like a library or your garage; you can’t just put things anywhere you want.
People who say connections lead to learning don’t go far enough. Connections are the learning. Surface learners focus on facts. Effective learners construct new knowledge by connecting new ideas to as many old ones as possible. They know that what we learn depends on what we already know—that you need a conceptual framework to embed what you’re learning. It takes knowledge to gain knowledge. Seek not to memorize, but to reinvent and discover for yourself.
All you need to know is one thing: there’s virtually no limit to how much learning we can achieve so long as we relate it to what we already know.