Why this is harder than it looks
Random Run asks you for a word that has nothing to do with the last one. Easy to say, surprisingly hard to do fast. Here’s what’s going on, and the research the game is built on.
Your memory is a web
Psychologists describe memory as a network. Words and ideas that go together are linked, and thinking of one wakes up its neighbours. This is called spreading activation. When you hear beach, words like sand, sea and towel are already half-awake before you’ve chosen anything.
That’s helpful most of the time. In Random Run it works against you. The first words your brain offers are exactly the ones that get a strike, so you have to push past them and reach somewhere else entirely. Under a ticking clock, that’s hard.
A real creativity test
In 2021, researchers published the Divergent Association Task in the journal PNAS. You name 10 words that are as different from each other as possible. A computer then measures how far apart the words are in meaning, using a map of how words are used in huge amounts of text.
In the researchers’ first studies, scores on this four-minute task lined up moderately to strongly with longer, established creativity tests, such as thinking up unusual uses for everyday objects. A follow-up study took it to about 8,500 people in 98 countries. Random Run takes the same idea and turns it into a game: every word is measured against the last one, with a clock running.
Your creative spread on the results screen follows that idea. It’s the average distance in meaning between all your answers in a run, on a scale of 0 to 100. Ten fruits would score close to 0. Ten random everyday nouns land around 65. A run like spreadsheet, xylophone, parliament, volcano scores in the high 80s. After a daily run, once enough people have played, you’ll also see how your spread compares with that day’s players.
Letter runs: a classic test too
“Name as many words as you can starting with F” is a long-standing verbal fluency test used by psychologists. A letter run combines it with the unrelated-word challenge. The game also picks letters that tempt you: the letter your obvious answers start with.
What this is and isn’t. Random Run is a game, not a psychological assessment. Creative spread uses a smaller word map than the published test and a timed ten-word format, so it’s our own scale, not a Divergent Association Task score. It isn’t an IQ score or a diagnosis. The researchers themselves say their task captures “only a sliver of one type of creativity”. We don’t claim that playing will make you more creative: we just think stretching for the unexpected word is fun.
Read more
- Olson, J. A., Nahas, J., Chmoulevitch, D., Cropper, S. J., & Webb, M. E. (2021). Naming unrelated words predicts creativity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(25).
- Try it: name unrelated words to test your creativity, Futurity, a plain-English summary with the researchers’ comments.
- Spreading activation and verbal fluency tests, on Wikipedia.