5 Benefits of Why Playing Crosswords Puzzles Is Best

 

A crossword is a word puzzle and word search game that usually takes the form of a square or a rectangular grid of white- and black-shaded squares. The game's goal is to fill the white squares with letters, forming words or phrases, by solving clues, which lead to the answers.

In languages that are written left-to-right, the answer words and phrases are placed in the grid from left to right and from top to bottom. The shaded squares are used to separate the words or phrases.

Doing crossword puzzles is a popular pastime; no one knows how many people do them, but estimates go as high as 50 million or more in the United States alone. Success at crossword puzzles taxes several aspects of memory and cognition.

The purpose of this article is to consider what crosswords provide and questions that they prompt regarding how the mind works.

Implicated topics include word associations, lexical memory search, semantic priming, the sparseness of word space, list generation, the feeling of knowing and of not knowing, mental aging, and the crossword puzzle as a vehicle for studying cognition.

I am addicted to crossword puzzles. I do not claim to be good at them, but only to enjoy them and to suffer withdrawal symptoms when deprived of them for more than a day or two.

The purpose of this article is to revisit a topic of long-standing interest (Nickerson, 1977) and to share some reflections about hints that the experience of trying to solve crossword puzzles can provide about how the mind works.

Why Crosswords:

A funny thing happens on the way to solving a puzzle. We don’t know the answer, and then we “concentrate” (whatever that means), which induces some mysterious biochemical reaction, and then it is transformed into a different state of being a state of knowing something we didn’t know moments before.

For pure logic games like Sudoku or FreeCell or even chess problems, the process makes sense. While such puzzles can be arbitrarily difficult, the logical steps toward a solution are so well understood they can easily be expressed in computer code.

Fact- or trivia-based puzzles like crosswords seem to be different, though. No amount of logical deduction can help when a European river you’ve never heard of crosses a film star from a movie we’ve never seen.

At best, we can say that some letters are more likely than others, but it seems that our only choice is to look up the answer or leave the square blank, and neither of those is entirely satisfying.

So given this apparent flaw, why are crosswords so popular? One answer is that when we look something up, at least we get to learn something new.

Another is that, crosswords in recent times now emphasize more wordplay over trivia leaning a little toward the style of British puzzles, or what we in America call mysterious(cryptic) crosswords.

Most people have cell phones and those who publish crosswords are finally starting to take notice. There’s starting to be a transition towards mobile devices and it seems to be paying off. There are dozens of popular crossword puzzle apps for both iOS and Android devices.

This is the first step in the right direction to target the youth. With that being said, getting mobile isn’t only about the youth. Elderly people love their mobile devices as well. In America, there are more elderly people with tablets than cell phones.

What Science Said about Crosswords:

“Puzzles boost verbal skills as well as cut dementia risks”. After a series of researches and experimentations, scientists determined that puzzles can improve memory and brain functions, even in older adults.

A simple game of crossword every day can improve mental functions in patients with brain damage or mental illness. They found a direct relationship between the entire process of solving the puzzle, the speed, the accuracy and a varying range of functions including attention, memory, and reasoning.

People who played crosswords regularly had much better and consistently improving performances compared to others. The tests also proved that playing daily crossword puzzles can reduce the mental age and improve the virility of a person by almost ten years.

Solving crossword puzzles also has a positive effect on our collaborative cruciverbalism. So, one might be thinking what exactly is collaborative cruciverbalism? It is one’s ability to think creatively and in an enhanced and strategic fashion when working in a group.

It can help us to improve social bonds and be more cooperative and understanding of other’s problems. Crosswords not only help us think better but also improve our verbal skills.

We can understand problems and solve them much faster than those who do not avail the benefits of playing daily crosswords puzzles.

Benefits of Playing Crosswords:

1.   Enhances the memory:

Taking some time to solve a crossword puzzle every day can have a significant impact on your memory. Are you one of those who is constantly forgetting small things and occasions?

This problem is more common than we might think. A majority of our population face a continuous decline in their memory as they begin to age.

Working on crossword puzzles regularly can curb this problem and enhance our memory power. It not only strengthens the prevailing connection between our brain cells but also set up new connections to augment the process.

The addition of these new connections can increase our mental speed and boost our thought process.

2.   Improve bonding when solved in Groups:

Some people love to add crossword puzzle games to their social events, family picnics, barbeques, and more. It is a fun and entertaining way to spend some quality time together. As mentioned above, when played in groups, the crossword puzzle can avail collaborative cruciverbalism.

It can help us bond with our close ones better and faster. In one of the several research works done on the positive effects of solving daily crossword puzzles, it was found that it can also “improve the speed of thinking and talking”.

3.   Get to learn new things everyday:

Famous philosophers have said that we never really stop learning, we constantly learn something new until the day we die. And what can be better than learning new words every day! Crossword puzzle creators use complicated, rare, and unused words with the sole purpose of leaving you puzzled.

There are several occasions when people have to check word meanings in the dictionary because they are extremely trying and complex. Solving them allows you to get exposed to such words that you would not have experienced otherwise.

Apart from increasing your memory power and boosting your creativity, you also get to enhance your vocabulary, which is a crucial skill that everyone needs in their life. 

4.   Help us deal with our problems:

All of us are constantly struggling with a plethora of real-life problems, just searching for easy and smart ways to solve them. Despite going through such difficult times, we know the end result will be worth its while. The world of crossword puzzles is quite similar.

The puzzles are not that easy to solve but we’ll know once we solve them; the result will be unimaginable. We rack our brain, squeeze it to its maximum potential to solve different puzzles every day.

And once we have successfully solved it, we get new confidence and vigour to take our real-life problems head-on.

5.   Improves Concentration Power:

Crossword puzzles are intense, intricate and difficult to understand. We need to be completely engaged and dig deep into the problem at hand. We need to be focused entirely on the puzzle if we want to solve it successfully.

This improves our concentration power and teaches us how to completely focus on a particular problem. Moreover, when we put all your focus on solving the puzzle, we forget about our daily problems and relax a little. Isn’t that a wonderful way to relax as well as sharpen your concentrating powers?

Conclusion:

Crossword puzzles have enjoyed over a century of success, but their place in society over the next century is in question. The crossword puzzle is an early 20th century game and it hasn’t changed much since then, which is a good thing, because people don’t want it to.

However, the way it is promoted needs to be changed. Back when everybody read the newspaper, the crossword puzzle was easily accessible.

Since the rise of the Internet, the readership of news publications has been on a steady decline. Considering the crossword puzzle relies on those publications for visibility, it’s clear that it needs to find a new medium soon.

Doing a crossword puzzle isn’t exciting, rather it is satisfying. It takes patience, critical thinking, and no distractions to properly do a crossword puzzle, which are three things younger people struggle with.

This is not to say that they are unable to do crosswords, but that they are unwilling. With age, we come to appreciate cognitive exercise. Crossword puzzle makers are banking on this; if it remains true, then crosswords will always have a place in society.

 

Written by – Sakshi Chauhan