But that model didn’t account for everything that working memory could do. In 1974, psychologists Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch divided short-term memory into three parts: the central executive, which controls the flow of information and two “slave” systems, the phonological loop and the visuo-spatial sketchpad, that feed perceptions to the executive. Crosswords reveal something going on in this space between the short-term working memory and long-term permanent recollections. didn’t know why he knew these answers, but he knew that he knew them.
DEFINE LIMBO HOW TO
couldn’t consciously lay down new tracks in long-term memory, when he did the same crossword over and over, he improved at clues he shouldn’t have been able to know how to solve (because they referred to post-1953 events). A 2004 study led by Duke scientist Brian Skotko proved that even though H.M. with nearly perfect anterograde amnesia, meaning he could form short- but not long-term recollections, rendering him the ideal subject for memory studies. A 1953 operation to remove his hippocampus left H.M. (Maybe it’s no accident that the layout of every self-storage warehouse resembles nothing so much as a crossword grid.) How the mind does crosswords provides a snapshot of the hard-to-define limbo between short- and long-term memory, where you form integrated units somewhat more complicated than just rapid-fire perceptions but that don’t get filed into long-term storage.Ĭonsider H.M., the most famous memory patient of the twentieth century. The crossword does seem to have a special relationship to memory: not as medicine, but as a sort of lens for understanding our mental storage units.
Media coverage about the crossword and dementia is completely black and white: crosswords are either the brain’s secret weapon or they’re a gigantic waste of time. Indeed, the more I researched, the more I realized that the story about crosswords and dementia could be told in either direction, and in equally compelling ways. Other crossword-bashing studies point out that people would be better served flexing their brains in a more creative activity-say, writing a musical. A longitudinal Scottish study showed that a regular puzzle habit didn’t seem to affect test subjects’ mental sharpness one way or the other. “Crosswords and puzzles do not prevent mental decline, study says,” a December 2018 CNN headline declares.
Belief in puzzle power has fueled multimillion-dollar industry of brain-training games like Lumosity or Dakim.īut as I dug deeper, I found that the narrative swung just as persuasively in the other direction. A 2011 experiment with members of the Bronx Aging Study found that a regular regimen of crosswords might delay the onset of cognitive decline. According to a University of Exeter study, older adults who regularly did word and number puzzles had increased mental acuity.
“Regular crosswords and number puzzles linked to sharper brain in later life,” a May 2019 Science Daily headline proclaims. And at first, all the studies I found seemed to bear this hypothesis out. The evidence, it seemed, couldn’t be clearer: doing crosswords late in life prevents dementia. When I was researching my book Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them, I was fascinated by my family’s case study. Murray lived to be 91, but the last several years of his life were marked with severe dementia. Irv died at age 94, and he barely experienced any cognitive loss before the last six months of his life, when he exhibited rapid mental decline. Murray swam a few times a week, devoured books and loved to travel. He methodically and religiously worked his way through each one, from the crossword to the jumble to the cryptoquip, a substitution cipher that asks solvers to decode clues and figure out the pun.Įxtroverted and spontaneous Murray, a successful businessman and local politician, also had his morning routine: coffee with lots of sugar oatmeal and tinkering on one of his many writing projects, such as a loosely autobiographical musical about a traveling salesman. For decades, Irv, an introverted, quiet, retired bartender and former military engineer, had the same morning routine: coffee and cream a roll and the puzzle page of the Press of Atlantic City. Let me tell you a tale of two grandfathers, Irv and Murray.
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