Wind back the clock to a minute ago. Now to a month ago. Now go back to your first day at school. It’s clear that shimmering inside your cerebrum is a galaxy of dates and names. But how did we gain these details, and how do we retain them? And where do puzzles belong in this intricate mesh?
This chapter offers some tips on improving memory, from everyday shopping lists to Roman palaces. We’ll also decode the electrochemical marvel that memory is, and meet a crossword addict called HM.
But first, see if you can memorise these twelve words:
cloud, thunder, breeze, emerald, ruby, diamond, mouth, foot, knuckle, goat, crab, lion
Strategic to a fault, your brain most likely bunched the words as you read them. Clustering or clumping is a proven technique, a way of sorting lengthy serves of data into logical bites. That’s why credit card numbers are more easily remembered when broken into quartets. Compare that to memorising the hostile block of 0494227815296210. And no, you’re not getting my three-digit security code.
To play along, now place your hand over the list of words above and see if you can recall any of the dozen. In order or at random, it doesn’t matter.
How did you go? If you like, take a second look and try again.
Doubtless you fared better the second time around, thanks to the reinforcement of reading it twice, but also due to clustering: the twelve words were grouped into weather terms, gems, body parts and animals. (And not just any animals, but zodiac animals, each one four letters.) People with stronger memories will notice such quirks like these, making the words extra sticky.
RECOLLECTION RELICS
Culture depends on memory. This truth holds strong among ancient and indigenous cultures, especially those that flourished separate from any literary tradition.
Here in Australia, Aboriginal songlines preserve a narrative within the landscape, a chain of stories rooted to locations, just as Greeks built their cranial palaces where every turn and nook evoked a memory. Dot paintings and tjuringa (sacred totems of scored stone or wood) also act as memory maps, prompting primal knowledge to those who carry the traditions.
In central Africa, the lukasa fulfils a similar role. Deriving from the Luba people, the lukasa (or ‘long claw’) is sculpted from hardwood. Typically the object resembles a flattened hourglass, its surface adorned by nicks and embedded beads, a tactile autocue of stories readable to the select few.
Far less sticky is list number two, or what I call the Teflon Twelve:
glove, mattress, oyster, psalm, knight, squirrel, bladder, scandal, crossword, cough, talent, porthole
On cue, your blood pressure climbs, the brain obliged to work a little harder, because there’s no clear logic behind the list. Thankfully all twelve are nouns at least—tactile for the most part—but that might be the sum of their connection. You could try clustering the list into sets of three or four, but a wiser approach is the narrative ploy.
Try weaving a story around the items, starting with a glove on a mattress. Better than a limp accessory, why not animate the glove to make it a ghostly hand beckoning you to enter your bedroom, gesturing hello from your queen-sized bed? Close your eyes and picture it. There, that’s chalked in your short-term memory now, the so-called ‘blackboard phase’ of retaining facts.
Terrified by this ghostly glove, you run away down the hall, only to collide with a gigantic oyster that’s blocking the way. An oyster?! Slowly, the shell closes around you, a mollusc-version of an iron maiden, so you drop to your knees and sing a psalm, the song’s silent P sure to Piss off the bivalve. Magically, this makes the oyster vanish, only for Sir Lancelot to arrive from the bathroom, a squirrel juggling acorns on his lance.
You get the picture. Let one item link to the next, ensuring each prompt heightens the absurdity. The weirder the tale, the stickier the ingredients, the greater your recall of it is likely to be.
Another technique is called the memory palace. Romans knew the method as ‘loci’, meaning ‘places’—the technique of mentally planting data across a physical space you can easily recall. Let’s return to your place, where that glove lived. Or possibly your front door, as we need to create a sequence to lodge the items as they appear, moving through your home as we gather the words, locus by locus.
As you approach your door, you see a glove dancing on your doormat, the fingers like little legs. You pick it up and slip the glove on your hand in the style of Michael Jackson, or a one-armed burglar. You step inside.
Boing! Who put this mattress on the floor? Oh well, the soft base makes it easier to sneak into your own home. And not just sneak, but bounce—a bouncy burglar with one glove, kangarooing down the hall.
And so on, from hall to lounge to kitchen, or however your house is configured. Orators like Cicero built their own mental palaces in order to address crowds for hours without notes, reviving well-known buildings within their minds to curate a speech’s key points, or sprinkling the bones of an argument around their internal forums.
The rationale behind such a method is twofold. Firstly, you integrate the new with the familiar, placing a ‘porthole’ in your laundry, or a ‘scandal’ in your linen cupboard. And secondly, you array the information into a sequence, a vital ploy for speechmakers who need to retrieve their points in order. So long as you have more than one palace in your repertoire: try using schools or offices, your local library, a bush track you can retrace. It’s wise to gather an array of locations, otherwise your home will soon become a midden of miscellaneous mental junk from previous recollections.
Brain-wise, memory is stored via its own neural sequence. If you took the glove-and-mattress challenge a moment ago, those random nouns would now hover in your prefrontal cortex, the same bundle of neurons that Mike Pope suppressed while playing prone in the fMRI scanner. A large part of this lobe, when not dealing with decision-making or moderating social behaviour, is a virtual warehouse of input that needs retaining. The moment you meet a new group of people, say, and cop a litany of names to remember, your prefrontal cortex is on active duty.
Should you really have to remember these names—imagine you’ve just joined a new tour-group for a month—then that’s when the hippocampus comes into play, a thoroughfare enlisted in the task of etching our memories more deeply via the entorhinal cortex, an electric bridge in the medial temporal lobe that links the hippocampus to the multiple folds of the cortex itself.
The hippocampus—Greek for ‘seahorse’, owing to the component’s many twists and ridges—is responsible for encoding sensory experience (such as visual or auditory input) into new neural pathways, embedded for future reference. The names of our fellow travellers funnel from the forebrain, via the hippocampus, and into the depths of the temporal lobe. If used often while lodged here, this rollcall will soon enter the ranks of explicit memory, available in nanoseconds like the alphabet, for example, or the names of your family members.
But what happens when the hippocampus is missing? How does a brain cope when the ability to archive data is lost? Rather than speculate on that scenario, let’s meet someone in that very situation: the world’s most extraordinary puzzler, Henry Molaison, known to medical history as HM. (And hereafter known as Henry, since his family lifted his anonymity after his death in 2008.)
Crossword man
Childhood disease successfully treated by Salk vaccine (5)
Japanese capital to host 1964 Olympics (5)
Glass Menagerie playwright who choked to death on a bottlecap (9,8)
The clues represent a catalogue of geography and sport, plus medicine and literature. How did you fare? Even if you didn’t know the cap of an eyedrop bottle undid Tennessee Williams, I daresay you knew his Glass Menagerie.
Likewise for Tokyo: most solvers could name Japan’s capital without knowing its Olympic history. Maybe immunologist Jonas Salk has never crossed your radar, but polio is certainly sealed somewhere in your entorhinal cortex.
This delicate balance between known and unknown is the learner’s constant mindset. Our brains carry established facts (the chemical symbol for iron, say) and must build on that bedrock as we learn compounds—extensions of that primary knowledge, adjusting to updates and more complex input.
Like few other people in history, Henry Molaison embodied that process. Born in Connecticut in 1926, some fifteen years after Tennessee Williams, Henry suffered epilepsy from an early age. While his seizures weren’t constant, they were violent and growing more frequent, leading to Henry undergoing radical surgery when he was 27.
William Scoville at Hartford Hospital was the surgeon in charge. His was the scalpel to remove most of Henry’s hippocampus, plus the core of both temporal lobes. Also culled were slices of the entorhinal cortex and the amygdala, the Greek ‘walnut’ that resides in the limbic system, storing many of our emotions.
The good news was that as a result of this surgery Henry was spared his epilepsy. The bad news: he now suffered anterograde amnesia. For the rest of his natural days, Henry was incapable of creating new memories.
The man could tie his shoes and make a bed, those mechanical tasks of procedural memory. He knew Shakespeare’s first name, and could identify the boats you see in Venice. But he’d lost the ability to learn and remember new things. Worse, Henry struggled to imagine the future, since our concept of tomorrow is built on our record of yesterday.
Imagine I suggested we visit the local pool next Tuesday. You’d be able to recall the location of the pool itself, or pools in general, the reek of chlorine, the diving board. Whereas for someone like Henry, a suggestion to visit the pool might only retrieve the colour blue. Or coldness on the skin. His present was paralysed, his future unimaginable. Yet there was some hope in the midst of Henry’s plight, the very reason his limbo has become so widely studied.
On the surface of things, Henry had lost the capacity to learn, or even remember what he’d eaten three minutes ago. Yet, scratching deeper, there was something stranger going on, and the patient’s new reality gave science a rare insight into how human brains acquire information.
It came down to word puzzles. Before going under the knife, Henry had loved doing crosswords, and he’d tackle at least two a day, establishing a robust archive of synonyms and antonyms within his memory, a trove of trivia and names, everything poised for explicit recall. And after his operation, the outpatient’s ardour for puzzles only grew. Later in his post-operative life, he said, ‘One thing I found out is that I fool around a lot with crossword puzzles. And well, it helps me in a way.’ What’s more, ‘You have fun while doing [them] too.’ No matter the time of day, Henry would rummage in the basket attached to his walker, pulling out the latest set of clues. He’d complete American-style quickies; most clues tested semantics or general knowledge, and Henry was capable of filling whole sections of the grid, if not the whole thing. He even coped well with advanced-level puzzles in a New York Times collection.
All up to a point, a very particular point in fact: he failed to register any event or celebrity, any film or neologism, postdating 1 September 1953, the day of his operation. The Rolling Stones were deaf to him. The Who was one big who? He had no grasp of Disneyland, Apollo 11, the Vietnam War. Henry lived, and solved puzzles, in the present while remaining exiled to the past.
Nonetheless, the crossword could well prove a conduit for new knowledge, or that was the theory Dr Brian Skotko was eager to test. Skotko, a clinical fellow in genetics at Boston’s Children’s Hospital, oversaw a series of trials with Henry, supplying him a series of custom-made crosswords. At its heart, the exercise was to measure the potential of gaining implicit memory—those details that subconsciously stick—via the agency of clues.
Skotko used clues like those which opened this section, each clue extending a pre-1953 fact—from polio to Tokyo—with an insinuated update. Would Henry glean the news via the clues? That was the question Skotko wished to examine.
Raymond Burr was a case in point. Before Henry’s surgery, the American film actor had been well established, starring in such noir thrillers as Desperate (1947), Pitfall (1948) and Abandoned (1949). Yet since Henry’s operation, Burr’s greatest claim to fame had been his TV roles, including the title roles in Perry Mason (1957–1966) and Ironside (1967–1975).
Burr was a burr, therefore, a stubborn piece of knowledge snagged in Henry’s temporal lobe. In memory, they are called anchor points; the grounded facts that underpin the subsequent developments. Burr was a name Henry knew, despite not knowing the new chapter of the actor’s career, and apparently lacking the wherewithal to retain that update. But could a crossword teach him that new fact? What might be the impact of this kind of clue:
Perry Mason portrayer, Raymond (4)
Or:
He played TV detective Ironside, Burr (7)
Little by little, the bespoke puzzles introduced these elements into Henry’s awareness. Frail links began in the man’s neural map between the known and the new, the familiar and the updated.
John F. Kennedy was a further example. Before Henry’s operation, the politician had already been prominent in the House of Representatives, becoming a senator in 1952. But that’s where his career ended for the outpatient—Henry’s post-op fog obscured Kennedy’s rise to power. According to Henry, J.F.K. never became president, let alone being shot in Dallas in 1963. As for Jackie Onassis, the name meant nothing.
And yet, crossword therapy yielded results. While Henry floundered with remembering random numbers (despite being shown the same seven-digit sequence 25 times) or failed to crack a simple stylus maze presented on a screen, he did glean the twists in J.F.K.’s career. When asked if Kennedy was alive or dead, Henry responded that he had been assassinated. He later mentioned that Jackie Onassis was formerly Kennedy’s wife, despite the marriage occurring two weeks after Henry lost his hippocampus.
WHATDUNIT
In 2009, a team at Toronto University ran a comb over Dame Agatha Christie’s eighty-plus crime novels. The project was led by ian Lancashire and Graeme Hirst, doctors of English and computing respectively, using software to profile the author’s overall text. And lying there, amid the arsenic and red herrings they uncovered a lulu.
In her prime, Christie ruled detective fiction, generating over two billion sales. Quite apart from the intricate plots, her novels bristled with stylish syntax and a gimlet eye for detail. Yet those laurels slipped in her last fifteen books.
Typical was a latish work, Elephants Can Remember. The analysis revealed a sharp drop in word variety by almost a third in contrast to her earlier books, coupled with a significant climb in repeated phrases and indefinite nouns—like ‘thing’, ‘something’, ‘anything’—as if the dame had lost her hold on language.
The plot of Elephants is equally telling: a senior crime novelist named Ariadne Oliver investigates a fishy murder–suicide from ten years earlier. The elephants of the title are the elderly friends of the dead, the unreliable witnesses strewn about the Cornish manses and nursing homes. Ms Oliver must separate truth from falsehood, fact from memory lapse. But she struggles, as does Dame Christie.
In fact, many critics perceive the novel’s true villain as less the fictional murderer than dementia itself. the book shows how an embattled mind has fewer words to muster a growing number of loose ends. Christie was never diagnosed, but her threadbare later novels speak volumes about the writer’s inner fugue.
President Bill Clinton on the other hand, the president at the time of Skotko’s research, was un-stickable for Henry’s mind. Devoid of an anchor point, the new name drew a blank, the intellectual links too soft to introduce the new leader.
Neuropsychologists call this the snowball effect, where the more you know, the easier it is to add knowledge. By design, crosswords accentuate this effect. On the first pass of the clues, you enter the answers you know. You jot down POLIO or PERRY MASON, each letter a potential anchor for the clues where the more elusive answers lie in hazier memory, the lesser known, or even the unknown. As Norman Doidge, the champion of neuroplasticity, writes, ‘Experts don’t store answers, but they do store key facts and strategies that help them get answers.’
Henry Molaison was less an expert than a creature of habit. He cracked the clues that seemed familiar, and then progressed as best he could from there, as we all do. Joe DiMaggio, the baseballer, was a household name for Henry, and ditto for Marilyn Monroe, their names linked in one encyclopaedic snowball. Yet the pair only married four months into Henry’s post-op life; he learnt of it—or at least stumbled onto it—via crosswords. Thanks to these carefully constructed crossword clues, in tandem with the puzzle’s intermesh, Henry collected several new titbits over three years of clinical puzzle-solving: he connected the Warsaw Pact of 1955 with World War II. He placed Raymond Burr on the television. He figured polio (‘an illness … does something to the nerves’) was cured.
But did any update linger? That was the fraught part to confirm for Skotko and Corkin. Once the information had arrived in HM’s brain, would it stay?
Sadly, the answer seemed no. After Henry stopped solving the bespoke puzzles, pre-1953 reality returned in living colour, with next to no new information retained. J.F.K. never married Jackie, just as Joe never met Marilyn, and the Warsaw Pact dissolved.
Which illustrates another side of crosswording: as much as the hobby can gift you with facts or unfamiliar words, those same riches are only realised if you actively use them, and reuse them. If not carried from the prefrontal to the temporal lobe for safekeeping, the data you gain will likely fray from memory, like a glove forgotten on a bed. Like a mattress on which no impression remains. Care to recite those twelve random nouns I gave you to start this chapter? Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten them.
Across Australia, over 425,000 people are living with dementia, as well as the million-plus people responsible for their care. Anguishing as the numbers are to read, the maths make it clear: if you aren’t linked to a family member or loved one living with the condition, then you’re the exception.
My own dad lived with frontotemporal dementia in his last seven years, shedding words in step with his volition as each year passed. Seeing first-hand this poignant reduction made me understand why most of us fret when forgetfulness strikes.
Not that such fears are always grounded. Forgetting is part of living. And the longer we live, the more there is to forget. Besides, there’s forgetting a restaurant’s name and drawing a complete blank about a recent event. There is forgetting the name of London’s river versus the way home from the train station.
Joseph Jebelli, an English neuroscientist, and author of In Pursuit of Memory, puts it more plainly: ‘Forgetting things in old age is not a sign of dementia. Your memory gets worse as it gets older, but that is fundamentally different from Alzheimer’s.’
In the words of Henry Brodaty, the Professor of Psychogeriatrics at the University of New South Wales, ‘We all become forgetful as we get older. We forget where we put the car-keys, or we forget people’s names. But it’s where loss of memory and other cognitive abilities lead to the interference in our daily lives that people cross a line, and say, “This is dementia.”’
So the difference comes down to the lapse’s gravity. Small things will slip our memory—that’s only natural—but it’s quite a different matter to forget how to cope. When it comes to symptoms that could signal dementia, significant memory loss is among a welter of other indicators, including severe mood changes, disorientation and problems performing familiar tasks. As a rule, doctors deem two or more such signs as being worthy of closer consultation.
Yet before we go further, let’s clarify the language. Dementia is the umbrella term that includes Alzheimer’s disease. As the name suggests, Alzheimer’s is a disease and not a legacy of old age. When one is living with Alzheimer’s, Jebelli explains, ‘you’re not losing your marbles, you have a serious illness’, one that ‘slowly takes away a person’s autobiography’. Someone who loses their innermost memory loses themselves in many ways.
Other major forms of dementia are vascular (triggered by damage to the brain’s blood vessels) and frontotemporal, as my dad underwent. Alzheimer’s dementia is flagged by two key abnormalities in the brain. One is a build-up of amyloid plaque among the neurons, hindering their ability to fire. The second is a tangle within the neuron’s cell body, chiefly from a structural protein called tau. The knottier it gets, the less efficient the brain’s nutrient supply becomes.
Which brings us again to puzzles—and reading, and social engagement, and a dozen other activities thought to lower the risk of dementia. What faith can we place in criss-crossing words to keep dementia off the doorstep? Neuroscientists are in consensus: the practice of solving puzzles, while no magic shield against dementia, is unquestionably part of a healthy lifestyle that helps to safeguard your wellbeing into later life.
Cognitive neuroscientist Professor Keith Wesnes teaches at the University of Exeter. In 2017, he oversaw an online study of 17,000 healthy people in the 50-plus bracket. Volunteers tackled nine mental tests, from memory to reasoning. Once collated, the overall results revealed a strong trend.
For crossword fans, the news was bright. To quote Wesnes, ‘Performance was consistently better in those who reported engaging in puzzles, and generally improved incrementally with the frequency of puzzle use.’ While the fountain of youth has yet to be located, Wesnes added, ‘Performing word puzzles was associated with an age-related reduction of around 10 years.’
Across the Atlantic, an equivalent study was held in 2012 at the University of California. The study recruited 65 healthy volunteers with an average age of 76, along with ten seniors living with Alzheimer’s and ten people in their 20s and 30s. The entire cohort was assessed via a series of mental tasks, much like the Exeter study.
While it’s worth noting this study’s modest sample size, the Peter Pan effect of puzzling again emerged. This time around, the brains of seniors who engaged in mentally stimulating activities, including puzzles, were comparable to those of the young people in the control group. By the same token, older volunteers without brain-bending habits scored results more aligned with those living with Alzheimer’s.
HEALTHY HABITS
‘Numerous studies,’ reports Dementia Australia, ‘suggest that engaging in more mentally stimulating activities through life is associated with better cognitive function, reduced cognitive decline and a lowered risk of developing dementia’. Aside from crosswords, and other puzzles such as sudoku, they recommend:
• reading in general
• listening to the radio
• visiting museums
• taking a course
• learning a new language
• eating a healthy diet
• engaging in regular exercise
• playing music and board games
• pursuing artistic and other hobbies
• participating generally in other social interactions.
So while we can’t say a puzzle will cancel the risk of dementia, we can confirm a stream of regular crosswords can enhance your mental agility and reliable recall.
Perhaps the last word belongs to Miriam Raphael, contributor to a Guardian forum in 2016. The context was yet another cognitive survey conducted among seniors, this one issued by the Mayo Clinic in 2016, with crosswords counted as part of ‘high midlife cognitive activity’. As readers debated the study’s merits on the forum, Miriam chipped in: ‘I’m just three weeks short of my ninetieth birthday, and both my husband and my neurologist have noticed some deterioration of my memory. But I still can solve crosswords, and I intend to continue to compete in crossword tournaments (and find my way home afterwards).’
