Word vectors in the creative brain

What is it about?

Let us take a short tour to the wild and untamed world of creativity. Since decades, scientists are trying to discover how our minds think in fresh and innovative ways. While doing so, they often consider three aspects, such as how many ideas we come up with (this is fluency), how different these ideas are from the usual one (this is originality), and how easily we switch between the different ideas (this is flexibility). But there is a twist: measuring flexibility turned out a little tricky as it often depends on subjective perception of words' similarities. This is where a promising new idea comes in — scientists are harnessing powerful computer tools to automate and objectify the measurement of creativity. In this study, we trained a model using a massive number of German words from stories, articles, and more — over half a billion words! This model then produced so-called "word vectors", enabling us to objectively calculate how closely related different words are. In some sense, this model became a flexibility judge that understands which words are appearing in the same context and so they are similar in their meaning. It then made sure that words that share the meaning (like "happy" and "joyful") are in the same club, preventing the flexibility judge from getting too excited about seeing a different idea in words that share the same meaning, which should not boost flexibility but fluency only. In the next step, we put this creativity judge to test. We gave it three sets of words and asked, "Hey judge, how similar are these?" The trained model performed well. Not only did it demonstrate proficiency comparable to other models within the field, but it also isolated flexibility in its purer form, such that the flexibility assessed by our model was confounded by fluency to a lesser extent. And there is more to it: Based on the judge’s findings we came up with two ways of calculating the flexibility of one's mind allowing not only an objective and time-efficient but also an individually tailored assessment of flexibility. Ultimately, this flexibility assessment tool for the German language provides the so far “missing puzzle” to an entirely objective assessment of a person’s creativity, and this, without spending too much time or treasure. It's a big leap forward in the quest of understanding the magical world of creative thinking.

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