Do crosswords stave off dementia?
If you want to lend a character in a film or TV program an intelligent air, give him or her a crossword. The puzzle serves as shorthand for a vague cluster of cleverness indicators, such as impressive powers of recall, sizable vocabulary, and perhaps speedy lateral thinking.
One link between crosswords and the brain that everyone seems certain about is that they yield greater dividends the older you get: A puzzle a day keeps dementia at bay. Well, that’s not quite “certain,” I think to myself as I wander over to the corner of an Oxford pub toward the waiting psychologist investigating the link between crosswords and mental acuity, but certainly many people know an elderly relative who does a puzzle every morning and still has all his or her faculties.
Sitting by the restrooms, I strap on a pair of noise-reduction headphones and begin the psychological test.
Kathryn Friedlander and her colleague Philip Fine are interested in solvers’ cognitive skills and motivational drivers. She has joined a weekly get-together for constructors, solvers, and crossword bloggers that takes place around the UK every Saturday. It started when the constructor John Henderson (Enigmatist, who has been constructing for The Guardian since he was fifteen years old) noticed that whenever he solved in a pub, others were looking over his shoulder, and decided against a festering annoyance and in favor of actively inviting others to join him.
This week, those others include Kathryn, who wants to be around crossworders so that she can gather some data. She has devised a series of exercises for three groups: solvers, expert solvers, and noncrossworders. I am invited to count the number of vowels in various words, then fill in the blanks in some others. I suspect that the first task is designed to hobble me in the second by planting in my head various unhelpful linguistic shapes and sounds. The research is ongoing, but I learn something about myself, and not something flattering: While I appreciate that the point of the exercise is academic enrichment, I find that I urgently want to get a decent “score.”
Afterward, we chat about Kathryn’s curiosity regarding whether very able solvers have higher “fluid intelligence”—the capacity to approach new problems with a fresh mind and apply the appropriate analysis. The tasks have been designed to give her a sense of what’s happening in the brain when it is led to a misleading place, then recovers its bearings and enjoys what the crossword world calls the “penny-drop” moment of clarity. For me, at least, I tell her, there’s an addictive quality to the experience of letting go of the apparent meaning of a clue and seeing the message hidden in code that leads to the real interpretation.
We discuss a paper with the title “Eye-Witnesses Should Not Do Cryptic Crosswords Prior to Identity Parades” from the journal Perception, which concludes that solving a cryptic has a detrimental effect on subsequent face recognition, and that the same does not go for quick crosswords, reading, or sudoku. It’s a convincing piece of research that presents its results cleanly and without undue speculation as to the reasons behind them. I ask Kathryn whether she has come across any similarly decent investigations into whether crosswords are good for older people’s minds. There’s not much in the papers, in the sense of peer-reviewed journals, but there’s plenty in the other sort of papers: tips such as 10 WAYS TO DECREASE ALZHEIMER’S RISK: FLEX THAT BRAINPOWER—DO CROSSWORD PUZZLES, or PUZZLES AND EXERCISE HELP BEAT DEMENTIA SYMPTOMS, SAY EXPERTS.
Ah, those much-vaunted “experts.” It’s from the newspapers that people I know—relatives and coworkers—have got the idea that crosswords are a prophylactic against Alzheimer’s. Newspapers are of course also the place where crosswords are most readily available, so the association is presumably good for circulation. In the twenty-first century, similar pieces began to appear about the benefits of the fourth estate’s newer geegaw, the sudoku.
There are more such articles every couple of months, and if the combined reports are to be believed, here’s the truth about crosswords: Solving is a handy way of hanging on to your faculties, but this comes at a cost. And the price is paid by your waistline. In 2009 there was a flurry of stories warning that solving puzzles makes you fat, citing research by Dr. Kathleen Martin Ginis of Ontario into whether exercising willpower in one activity leaves less resolve when you approach others.
Since solving is often a seated pastime, it’s not difficult to visualize a connection between crosswords and gastric girth—and the same goes for the idea that crosswords are a kind of brain-saving mental workout. You can see vividly how both claims might be true. Alternatively, they might both be false. Or they might be neither, in the sense that nobody has actually tested either.
In the case of the crossword obesity epidemic, it’s the last of those options. Ginis’s research didn’t include any sudokus or crosswords. “Someone told me that the story had been in the UK press,” she told the BBC. “I was quite excited. I googled it, I saw it, and I just cringed. I felt sick.”
Probe too deeply into the evidence for stories that use words like “neurobics” and “brainercise,” and you’ll find yourself similarly baffled and confounded. Here’s the clearest statement I’ve seen about the facts of the matter. It’s from a 1999 paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology called “Predictors of Crossword Puzzle Proficiency and Moderators of Age-Cognition Relations,” and it is, to say the least, deflating: “The results provide no evidence to suggest that amount of crossword puzzle experience reduces age-related decreases in fluid cognition or enhances age-related increases in crystallized cognition.” In other words, solve if you like, but don’t think it will stop you going gaga.
Kathryn’s experience is similar. Crosswords may or may not have these beneficial effects but the evidence isn’t there to tell us much. Besides, she adds, what aspects of which kind of crossword are we talking about?
Some elements of solving—synonyms, say, antonyms, and abbreviations—are correlated with regular solving, but may also improve with age, whether you solve or not. Others—preserving ambiguities, switching from the big picture to the details—decline. Doing crosswords makes you better at doing crosswords, but that’s not such an exciting discovery. A proper examination of popular computer games with names like Professor Okinaga’s Cerebral Zumba revealed that users are no better at memory, concentration, planning, or problem solving than nonusers; what these programs do is make you good at the next volume you buy of Professor Okinaga’s Cerebral Zumba, and there’s no reason to believe that the same is not the case with crosswords.
And what of the real-world anecdotal examples: the avidly solving relatives who have retained their marbles? Can we say with any certainty whether the solving is the cause of the retention of marbles, or the retention of marbles the cause of the solving, or whether both share an earlier cause? Crucially, I’d like to know more about whether this relative solves alone or with a friend or relative.
Kathryn is more open to the idea that cosolving might have benefits for the elderly, and she is not alone in her interest in the social angle. I’d recommend crosswords over sudokus as a morning activity in the Rusty Cogs Retirement Home on the basis that you’re less likely to call out an interesting sudoku column for everyone to enjoy or to find yourself inspired to relate an anecdote on the basis of an especially amusing 7 in that day’s grid. Whatever puzzle you choose, a daily challenge that offers temporary goals and some pleasure is not a bad thing; as a cheap way of dealing with mental-health problems in an aging population, however, it may not be enough.
The image of crosswords as intrinsic Alzheimer’s bashers seems unlikely to go away anytime soon. For one thing, there’s the legacy of the notion that you have to be particularly intelligent to solve a crossword.
For another, the association has a distinct appeal for constructors and solvers, both of whom are often asked to explain why on earth they channel their time and energy into puzzles. “Still, it staves off dementia, I suppose” lets them off the hook. But the implicit charge—that crosswords are a waste of time—should not need to be countered. There’s no real comfort in seeing the newspapers that decried the arrival of the crossword in the 1920s and proscribed their use on grim utilitarian grounds now prescribing their use on a similarly dispiriting cost-benefit basis.
And so I leave Kathryn to her research and look back across the pub to the gathered solvers, all of whom are there because it’s a congenial way to spend an afternoon and an opportunity to have a stiff word or two with the constructors of some recent troublesome clues. That’s an end in itself. If you want to do a puzzle, you don’t need a doctor’s note.
(So if the puzzle appears to be taking longer than usual, you don’t need to fear for your mental capacity. Besides, what are you doing timing your solve, anyway . . . ?)