Associative memory systems, methods and computer program products are provided. An associative memory system includes a distributed associative memory base including a network of networks of associative memory networks. A respective associative memory network includes associations among a respective observer memories and a plurality of observed memories that are observed by the respective observer memory. Ones of the associative memory networks are physically and/or logically independent from other ones of the associative memory networks. A processing system is configured to observe associations into and imagine associations from, the distributed associative memory base using multiple streaming queues that correspond to respective ones of multiple rows in the associative memory networks. The processing system is further configured to determine a cognitive distance between a term and a class of terms, the cognitive distance being returned responsive to a query of the distributed associative memory base.