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.

Classified as: mcgill research, Jay Olson, Department of Psychiatry, creativity and imagination, measuring creativity, semantic distance, Divergent Association Task (DAT)
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Published on: 20 Jul 2021

Magicians have astonished audiences for centuries by subtly, yet powerfully, influencing their decisions. But there has been little systematic study of the psychological factors that make magic tricks work.

Classified as: Research, psychology, McGill News, Jay Olson, cognition, consciousness, magic, Raz
Published on: 9 Feb 2015
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