Liberals and conservatives alike subscribed to Lockean and Hartleian associationist psychology: that is, they believed that a person's sense of self was built up through a set of associations made between things in the external world and ideas in the mind.
Following research conducted in a Tanzanian cave, she conjures metaphorical cross-associations between all things ovoid and is lyrical about bubbles: "The bubble is a world, an orb a moon, a sun and a crystal ball.
Just as the expectation of a placebo's effect informs how we perceive physical symptoms, associations create connections between things, which may or may not be related.
Pathologist Dr Freddy Patel said there was a "compelling association" between the two things and it was "well recognised" that a stressful trauma can aggravate a heart condition.
"No one knows how a child can learn to speak, but if we somehow think that part of of human language learning is helped by being able to make associations rapidly and easily, between things in the world and sounds corresponding to those objects, then this gene might help with that process," Graybiel said in the email.
In contrast, people's capacity to make associations or connections, especially unusual ones, between things or ideas presented in a test can be used as the basis for inferring creativity, although producing a creative product requires other attributes, including motivation, opportunity, and technical skill.
Associative memory (the ability to learn, store, and retrieve associations between actions or things) also declines dramatically.
The trick, it seems, is seeing the similarities between things and making the necessary associations.
Finally and most importantly, people tend to create associations between ideas of things that are causally related.
