Superintelligence
The Effect of Semantic Distance on Learning
And how to increase your creativity
Table of contents
- Semantic similarity
- The effect of semantic distance on cognitive load
- The effect of semantic distance on degrees of separation
- Avoiding interference
- Connecting high-semantic distance concepts
Creating analogies decreases the average semantic distance of a concept network, which can make it easier to combine concepts and, therefore, creativity.
A too low semantic distance isn’t good either as it can cause interference, as written in my other article:
It is usually most efficient to try to combine abstract and general concepts with each other first before more detailed and concrete ones (as the former connects a lot more indirectly).
Semantic similarity
Semantic similarity: a metric defined over a set of documents or terms, where the idea of distance between items is based on the likeness of their meaning or semantic content as opposed to lexicographical similarity (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_similarity)
The higher the semantic similarity (as it is stored in your brain) between ≥2 concepts, the higher the probability that one will active other(s) e.g. when you learn something new, you think “Oh, this reminds me of X.” (where “X” probably has a relatively high semantic similarity with “this” e.g. the letter “A” probably has a higher probability of activating the concept “alphabet” than “food”).
Learning more about a concept and adding more details to it can increase the probability that it can activate other concepts, because a certain component of that concept reminds you of another.
Related concepts
- Structural similarity index measure (SSIM): used for measuring the similarity between two images
The effect of semantic distance on cognitive load
By reducing semantic distance, you can increase learning speed (and creativity) while keeping cognitive load the same.
The effect of semantic distance on degrees of separation
“Semantic distance” has a positive correlation with “degrees of separation”.
There’s this concept called “six degrees of separation”, which says that all people on average are six, or fewer, social connections away from each other. As a result, a chain of “a friend of a friend” statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation)
The degrees of separation or semantic distance between the concepts “music” and “reality” might not be that much as one may think/feel. Or an interesting one: “psychology” and “entropy”:
Psychological Entropy: A Framework for Understanding Uncertainty-Related Anxiety
The amount of possible pathways, however, grows exponentially with each semantic step away.
(Food for thought: this exponential increase could also make the working memory appear not that small (approx. 4 slots) as it may seem).
Avoiding interference
A too low semantic distance can cause interference: The concepts are too much alike.
This can cause forgetting and synaptic pruning of whatever the brain decides to keep (especially during NREM sleep):
Avoiding interference can be done by increasing the specificity and details of concepts (decreasing the construal level) and perhaps even deliberately highlighting the differences between concepts.
Boolean algebra
As highlighted in my other article, another way to avoid interference is by applying Boolean algebra, and especially conjunction.
Conjunction is another way to increase specificity (and decrease construal level) and, therefore, avoid interference between similar concepts.
Connecting high-semantic distance concepts
One way to more easily connect concepts with high semantic distances, is by using your “diffuse mode”.
This can be done various ways of which I recommend reading the following article:
Personally, I like the following system:
Initiation (gathering information) → incubation (take some rest and return to it later on) → illumination (the Eureka or “aha” moment”) → verification (verify whether it’s logical, using your consciousness). Read more about this system:
Another way to connect high-semantic distance is via psychedelics:
