crossword puzzle maker 30 plus free printable

The person with the pen (or tablet) in their hand typically reads out the clues, and we all chime in with our best answers. Lastly, at least in my house, crossword puzzles are generally a social activity.The hippocampus will then remember those new connections, strengthening both your hippocampus and cortex. These features mean that crossword puzzles cause large areas of your cortex to be active, and stimulate new connections in your brain. Moreover, crossword puzzle clues often force you to link concepts you hadn't pictured together. Second, a well-designed crossword puzzle will engage multiple brain regions in your search for the right word.First, doing crossword puzzles is difficult, and many studies have shown that performing moderately difficult cognitive tasks is helpful for cognitive and brain health.There are several reasons why working on crossword puzzles in daily life could improve your thinking and memory, and even slow the shrinking of your brain. The crossword puzzles were designed to be moderately difficult, equivalent to a Thursday New York Times crossword puzzle.

How many crossword puzzles should you be doing?Ī 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.

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. 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. So, the question to ask about brain volume is whether an intervention like medication or crossword puzzles can slow the shrinkage. In individuals with mild cognitive impairment and in those aging normally, the brain tends to shrink. How much might crossword puzzles benefit your brain? So, to be showing an improvement in cognition at both 12 and 78 weeks is quite impressive. The other thing to keep in mind is that about half of people with mild cognitive impairment show declines in thinking and memory over time. This means that crossword puzzles can improve thinking and memory almost as much as an FDA-approved memory-enhancing medication. In fact, 37% of those doing crossword puzzles did show at least a two-point improvement. 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. They also engaged in several shorter booster sessions.Ĭompared 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. Each group completed 30-minute sessions four times weekly for 12 weeks. 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. How much did crossword puzzles benefit thinking and memory? Future studies in healthy older adults will need to be conducted with crossword puzzles as the intervention to gather more evidence. The authors of the study point out that crossword puzzles are typically used as a control condition against which other interventions are measured. 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. Those who took part in the study were highly educated, with most participants having a college education. Twenty-five percent identified as Black or Latino, and thus - at least regarding race and ethnicity - the results are likely generalizable to the population of the US.

All had mild cognitive impairment, which means that their thinking and memory were impaired compared to healthy older adults. The participants in this 18-month study were between 62 and 80 years of age. Will doing crossword puzzles help everyone? 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. 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.

Crossword puzzle maker 30 plus free printable