Extracting Spooky-activation-at-a-distance from Considerations of Entanglement

Abstract: Following an early claim by Nelson & McEvoy \cite{Nelson:McEvoy:2007} suggesting that word associations can display `spooky action at a distance behaviour', a serious investigation of the potentially quantum nature of such associations is currently underway. This paper presents a simple quantum model of a word association system. It is shown that a quantum model of word entanglement can recover aspects of both the Spreading Activation equation and the Spooky-activation-at-a-distance equation, both of which are used to model the activation level of words in human memory.