12/29/2023 0 Comments Daily crosswords![]() 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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