Forming associations between different aspects of our sensory and cognitive experience allows us to remember specific events and abstract knowledge about the world that surrounds us. Our coworkers don’t query us each morning about who we are and where we’re from, since they’ve associated that information with the visual inputs corresponding to our faces. If they instead ask us how our weekend was, we can use that cue to remember our visit to the beach and tell them about our experience. We don’t need to consult a map to make it from our desks to the coffee machine, since we’ve associated those objects with locations in space. And we also don’t need to worry about our coffee being too hot, since we’ve associated the machine’s output with a reasonable temperature. It could have been a very bewildering and inefficient start to our day -- but thanks to associations, it was not.
