This video we're just going to quickly talk about the organization of long-term memory because if this thing has nearly infinite capacity, we have to keep it pretty organized, right? And we believe that long-term memory is organized using something called associative networks. You might also see these called semantic networks; those two terms refer to the exact same thing. So associative networks are these networks consisting of nodes that represent interrelated concepts. So the idea behind these is that the more frequently you are associating these concepts, or these nodes, the stronger the link between them is going to be.

And over time, activating one node is going to make related nodes easier to retrieve. So that sounds a bit fancy, but really, if you've ever played that game where somebody says a word and you say the first word that pops into your mind, the whole point of that game is to activate associative networks. So if I say peanut butter and you think about jelly, we just activated an associative network in your brain. Peanut butter and jelly are concepts that tend to be very interrelated in American culture. They get very frequently associated, and so they have a very strong link between them, which means that activating one of those nodes, like peanut butter, makes the related nodes easier to retrieve, like jelly.

Now associative networks are unique to each individual because we all have unique experiences, we make unique associations. However, like we just demonstrated, we do tend to see some overlap with common factual and cultural information. So to give you another example, if I was to say cow to you, you might think about milk. Right? A lot of us relate via concepts of cow and milk.

But then if you think about milk, you might also think about cheese and eggs. Right? You might think about dairy products just kind of in general. All of these are interrelated nodes that get associated very frequently. You might have also thought about a farm.

And when you think about a farm, it might be easier for you to start thinking about concepts like pigs and sheep and chickens, and then chickens are also related to eggs, and everything kind of ties together. Right? So each of these is a node, and all of these nodes have these links or these associations between them, and those links are going to be stronger the more frequently you are relating those nodes to each other. Alright. So that is the organization of long-term memory, and I will see you guys in our next video.

Bye bye.