my mind on books

ReadWriteWeb (that can be a tonguetwister if I try to say it out loud!) posted about the Human Brain Cloud, a “massively multiplayer word association game.” I especially like the “view the cloud” tab, where you can type in a word to see what associations it has. The site sometimes gets overloaded, so if you get an error message, just try again later.

The same ReadWriteWeb post also mentions an interesting study on ‘Google and the Mind: Predicting Fluency with PageRank’:

ABSTRACT—Human memory and Internet search engines face a shared computational problem, needing to retrieve stored pieces of information in response to a query. We explored whether they employ similar solutions, testing whether we could predict human performance on a fluency task using PageRank, a component of the Google search engine. In this task, people were shown a letter of the alphabet and asked to name the first word beginning with that letter that came to mind. We show that PageRank, computed on a semantic network constructed from word-association data, outperformed word frequency and the number of words for which a word is named as an associate as a predictor of the words that people produced in this task. We identify two simple process models that could support this apparent correspondence between human memory and Internet search, and relate our results to previous rational models of memory.

Siva Vaidyanathan at the “Googlization of Everything” was not that impressed by the study though.