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A study published in NEJM Evidence found that people with mild memory problems who did web-based crossword puzzles showed improvement in cognition and experienced less brain shrinkage, compared to those who played web-based cognitive games.
Is this result for real? Can doing crossword puzzles really make you sharper and keep your brain from shrinking? Let's dive into this study to understand the results and see how you can apply them to your life.
Will doing crossword puzzles regularly be helpful for you if your thinking and memory are normal? My best guess is that it will, but we don't know for sure. The authors of the study point out that crossword puzzles are typically used as a control condition against which other interventions are measured. Future studies in healthy older adults will need to be conducted with crossword puzzles as the intervention to gather more evidence.
Study participants were randomly assigned to either a group that solved online crossword puzzles or a group that played online cognitive games focused on memory, processing speed, and executive function. Each group completed 30-minute sessions four times weekly for 12 weeks. They also engaged in several shorter booster sessions.
Compared to their baseline performance on a 70-point scale, crossword puzzles improved participants' cognition by about one point at the 12-week timepoint, and by about half a point at the 78-week timepoint. That may not sound like much, but the FDA approval for drugs that improve thinking and memory in people with Alzheimer's disease (cholinesterase inhibitors) was based on a two-point difference on this scale. In fact, 37% of those doing crossword puzzles did show at least a two-point improvement. This means that crossword puzzles can improve thinking and memory almost as much as an FDA-approved memory-enhancing medication.
In individuals with mild cognitive impairment and in those aging normally, the brain tends to shrink. So, the question to ask about brain volume is whether an intervention like medication or crossword puzzles can slow the shrinkage. Two common structures evaluated in this context are the size of the hippocampus, which remembers the episodes of your life, and the thickness of the cortex, which is where your thinking occurs. When compared to playing online cognitive games, working on online crossword puzzles resulted in between 0.5% and 1% less shrinkage in both the hippocampus and the cortex over the course of the 18-month study. This is an impressive difference.
A look at the study protocol reveals that the participants were asked to work on crossword puzzles four times a week, for 30 minutes per session. The crossword puzzles were designed to be moderately difficult, equivalent to a Thursday New York Times crossword puzzle.
A crossword (or crossword puzzle) is a word game consisting of a grid of black and white squares, into which solvers enter words or phrases ("entries") crossing each other horizontally ("across") and vertically ("down") according to a set of clues. Each white square is typically filled with one letter, while the black squares are used to separate entries. The first white square in each entry is typically numbered to correspond to its clue.
Crosswords commonly appear in newspapers and magazines. The earliest crosswords that resemble their modern form were popularized by the New York World in the 1910s. Many variants of crosswords are popular around the world, including cryptic crosswords and many language-specific variants.
Crossword grids such as those appearing in most North American newspapers and magazines feature solid areas of white squares. Every letter is checked (i.e. is part of both an "across" word and a "down" word) and usually each answer must contain at least three letters. In such puzzles shaded squares are typically limited to about one-sixth of the total. Crossword grids elsewhere, such as in Britain, South Africa, India and Australia, have a lattice-like structure, with a higher percentage of shaded squares (around 25%), leaving about half the letters in an answer unchecked. For example, if the top row has an answer running all the way across, there will often be no across answers in the second row.
Substantial variants from the usual forms exist. Two of the common ones are barred crosswords, which use bold lines between squares (instead of shaded squares) to separate answers, and circular designs, with answers entered either radially or in concentric circles. "Free form" crosswords ("criss-cross" puzzles), which have simple, asymmetric designs, are often seen on school worksheets, children's menus, and other entertainment for children. Grids forming shapes other than squares are also occasionally used.
Puzzles are often one of several standard sizes. For example, many weekday newspaper puzzles (such as the American New York Times crossword puzzle) are 1515 squares, while weekend puzzles may be 2121, 2323, or 2525. The New York Times puzzles also set a common pattern for American crosswords by increasing in difficulty throughout the week: their Monday puzzles are the easiest and the puzzles get harder each day until Saturday. Their larger Sunday puzzle is about the same level of difficulty as a weekday-size Thursday puzzle.[1] This has led U.S. solvers to use the day of the week as a shorthand when describing how hard a puzzle is: e.g. an easy puzzle may be referred to as a "Monday" or a "Tuesday", a medium-difficulty puzzle as a "Wednesday", and a truly difficult puzzle as a "Saturday".
Typically clues appear outside the grid, divided into an across list and a down list; the first cell of each entry contains a number referenced by the clue lists. For example, the answer to a clue labeled "17 Down" is entered with the first letter in the cell numbered "17", proceeding down from there. Numbers are almost never repeated; numbered cells are numbered consecutively, usually from left to right across each row, starting with the top row and proceeding downward. Some Japanese crosswords are numbered from top to bottom down each column, starting with the leftmost column and proceeding right.
American-style crossword clues, called straight or quick clues by those more familiar with cryptic puzzles, are often simple definitions of the answers. Often, a straight clue is not in itself sufficient to distinguish between several possible answers, either because multiple synonymous answers may fit or because the clue itself is a homonym (e.g., "Lead" as in to be ahead in a contest or "Lead" as in the element), so the solver must make use of checks to establish the correct answer with certainty. For example, the answer to the clue "PC key" for a three-letter answer could be ESC, ALT, TAB, DEL, or INS, so until a check is filled in, giving at least one of the letters, the correct answer cannot be determined.
Capitalization of answer letters is conventionally ignored; crossword puzzles are typically filled in, and their answer sheets published, in all caps. This ensures a proper name can have its initial capital letter checked with a non-capitalizable letter in the intersecting clue.
The constraints of the American-style grid (in which every letter is checked) often require a fair number of answers not to be dictionary words. As a result, the following ways to clue abbreviations and other non-words, although they can be found in "straight" British crosswords, are much more common in American ones:
Many American crossword puzzles feature a "theme" consisting of a number of long entries (generally three to five in a standard 1515-square "weekday-size" puzzle) that share some relationship, type of pun, or other element in common. As an example, the New York Times crossword of April 26, 2005 by Sarah Keller, edited by Will Shortz, featured five themed entries ending in the different parts of a tree: SQUAREROOT, TABLELEAF, WARDROBETRUNK, BRAINSTEM, and BANKBRANCH.
The Simon & Schuster Crossword Puzzle Series has published many unusual themed crosswords. "Rosetta Stone", by Sam Bellotto Jr., incorporates a Caesar cipher cryptogram as the theme; the key to breaking the cipher is the answer to 1 across. Another unusual theme requires the solver to use the answer to a clue as another clue. The answer to that clue is the real solution.
Many puzzles feature clues involving wordplay which are to be taken metaphorically or in some sense other than their literal meaning, requiring some form of lateral thinking. Depending on the puzzle creator or the editor, this might be represented either with a question mark at the end of the clue or with a modifier such as "maybe" or "perhaps". In more difficult puzzles, the indicator may be omitted, increasing ambiguity between a literal meaning and a wordplay meaning. Examples: e24fc04721
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