Concepts and retrieval. Features, tags and handles.

Trying to find a point, an edge or to use a word more modern, a tag to unravel the thoughts connected. It is what I have come across while I was reading about cognitive arrangements. Cognition describing the organization of knowledge structures in our minds. The concepts, ideas and thoughts that we have amassed and how we make use of them. I must have written something about them. All of these knowledge structures tangled up, chaotic arrangements I dare say, (I am still struggling to trace the word I am looking for), and by pulling on a specific feature you drag along the concept or concepts attached. All the concepts dragged they have specific or nonspecific connections with the feature that dragged them.

It is obvious from the above that once a concept is brought into our attention, specifically or non-specifically, it is scrutinized by our rational mechanisms for all its associated features and the feature responsible for dragging it. As a result, the concept is adapted to accommodate the new feature. A new arrangement is achieved, a new configuration depicting a new state of the world. That increases the arsenal of concepts held in storage in our brains and improves our capacity to assess the states the world daily presents to us, by being able to discern even more subtle differences between the states presented.

Oh fuck, I got the word I was looking for. Handle. Handles to grab on and drag along the whole concept. Handle being one of the features associated with any particular concept. Any feature in a concept, thought, notion or idea can act like a handle. Taking it further, it could even bring forth feelings, sensations, fears and body responses since all these are organised in the same manner with features tagging along chains of associated responses and can act as handles. So, similarly they are dragged along in our conscious mind whenever a specific or non-specific handle is grabbed on.

Now I come across, that very same mechanism of a handle in that del.icio.us website. The tags, like handles, drag along a host of websites that share this particular feature, the tag. The chain of websites dragged, specifically or non-specifically connected with the tag-feature, are presented in chaotic arrangements. And, in a similar manner, as it happens in our minds, we would expect that the feature-tag that dragged along all these new websites will bring out new arrangements, new configurations, re-modeling the world states we store in our minds, adapted into new knowledge structures, hopefully improved.