Joel Voss, a postdoc at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, studied himself to measure the capacity of associative memory:
No previous experiments on humans have investigated the capacity of associative memory. I describe the first relevant data, which I obtained by systematically probing my own capacity during 58,560 memory trials for picture—response associations (approximately 1 year of testing). Estimated capacity was on the order of several thousand associations.
A few thousand is the number of characters a well-educated Chinese person knows.
That’s quite fascinating. I’m reminded of the authors I like who tend to make use of ambiguity, like Nabokov or Pynchon. Having just one interpretation of their work is no fun. I also wonder if associative thinking if stronger in people who score high on the big five personality trait of openness, who Daniel Nettle thinks are better at divergent thinking than people lower on that scale. Assuming the student who did this study is an intellectual and so probably higher than average in openness, perhaps one might hypothesize lower numbers of associations made in people lower on openness.