Analogical Thinking

Big thing in psychology today - Asscociative thinking

By Ted Pin ⋅ November 15, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

A former Intermz team member sent me an article about a recent video interview (13 mins) with economics Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman who said that associative thinking is one of two big things happening in psychology today (the other big thing being the study of the brain).

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/thaler_sendhil08/class4.html

His basic premise is that words and ideas influence our thoughts and behavior in fundamental (and sometimes surprising ways) because of how we link those words and ideas with what is already in our heads. Most of these effects occur unconsciously.

We at Intermz obviously believe in the power of idea association, but mostly for consciously tying in new information to old information. However, Kahneman’s talk offers a lot of interesting examples of how powerful our brain’s association and analogy mechanisms are. The link includes a transcript of the entire interview, but you can get at the meat of it by just watching the video.

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