The Power of Association

When I was young my mother used to tell me that I had selective hearing. I could hear everybody else perfectly fine, but whenever she told me to do something, I "didn't" hear her. I'm sure sometimes I heard her and just pretended like I didn't, but there definitely seemed to be some truth in her statement. I always wondered why that was. Could my mind really be influencing what I could hear?

Apparently, the answer is yes. The three papers I read this week all showed very clear examples of hearing, or at the very least recognizing what was heard, being greatly affected by the mind. In the King/Sumner paper, we learn that not only do the words spoken before affect the words we hear, but also the person saying them. And if what they are saying does line up with who we think they are, it takes even longer for our brain to understand them. In the Sumner/Kataoka, we learned that the mere frequency of the word does not matter as much as the context the word was learned in. And in the short Sumner paper, we learned that how we perceive words changes how we even hear ourselves, or at least we convince ourselves that we are saying the GA version of the word even if we are not.

Last week, we talked about how even though papers may not be directly related with one another, we should still try to find the association between them. And the key to these papers is just that: association. When primed with a word, we are more likely to recognize words we associate with that word. We associate certain people with certain words/phrases, allowing us to recognize phrases more easily based on the strength of certain associations. And we want to associate ourselves with normalcy, so we assume that the pronunciations we associate with normalcy are what we say.

Human brains work by association. I don't think we have definitions of words, just complex nets of associations with other words or symbols. And these associations can affect how well we can recognize and understand words, for better or worse. Sometimes you recognize a word more quickly than you would have normally, because you used context clues. Other times you associate your mother's voice with chores, and shut it out completely. In either case, your hearing is being affected by associations. The next step is to figure out how to use this to our benefit.