HumanBrainCloud.com - A Crowd Based Psych Experiment

HumanBrainCloud is a multiplayer word association game/experiment. Word association is of course correlated with psychological tests, so HumanBrainCloud could be thought of as a massive, group psych analysis. Results are kept and displayed as part of the cloud. To start playing simply enter the first word that comes into your mind in association with the word displayed. You can skip words or flag them as made up, misspelled, etc. So far over 500,000 unique words have been submitted, and over 5 million connections have been made. The strongest connections so far include: Mona and lisa, teddy and bear, and ping and pong. The ten top most submitted words include: sex (what a surprise), me, money, and car. Humans are the same all over the world, it seems.

“I wanted to try and make a very simple "massively multiplayer game" while taking a break from making this game, and the result was Human Brain Cloud - a massively multiplayer word association "game" or experiment ... or something. The idea is that given a word, a player types in the first thing that comes to mind and the results are combined into a giant network.

For instance given the word "volcano", a common word people might submit would be "lava", and this would result in a very strong connection between "volcano" and "lava". On the other hand, given the word "volcano", fewer people might associate it with something like "birthday party", resulting in a very weak connection or no connection at all. Over time and with many players, I hope the cloud will gradually grow to represent words and phrases people tend to associate with other words and phrases, assuming it doesn't get inundated with spam. The cloud started with just one word, "volcano". All other words were submitted by visitors to this site.”

This is a fascinating little experiment as it’s got value as a social study, and as a game. Interesting to see how the mind’s of others work, and how programmed we are to marketing messages.

Will this evolve into anything more than a simple game? Are multiple languages on the way? What about a single player version or an invite only version?