Measuring creativity, one word at a time

Can you think of three words that are completely unrelated to one another? What about four, five, or even ten? According to an international team of researchers from McGill University, Harvard University and the University of Melbourne, this simple exercise of naming unrelated words and then measuring the semantic distance between them could serve as an objective measure of creativity. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , uses the Divergent Association Task (DAT), a 4-minute, 10-word test to measure one aspect of creative potential. The DAT was originally devised by Jay Olson , a recent PhD graduate from McGill's Department of Psychiatry, inspired by a childhood game involving thinking of unrelated words. He wondered whether a similar task could serve as a simple and elegant way to measure divergent thinking, the ability to generate diverse solutions to an open-ended problem. While studies of creativity and its nature are not new, relatively little is known about the process itself. "Creativity is fundamental to human life," explains Olson, who is now a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard. "The more we understand its complexity, the better we can foster creativity in all its forms." - An easier and simpler way to test creativity .