22 Part I: Crossword Strategies and Brain Benefits
Come armed with questions to ask about current events, politics, movies,
books... anything that may get all of you thinking and interacting in new
ways.
✓ Tackle some puzzles: In the next section, I talk about how crosswords can
play a part in your mental fitness routine. But don’t limit yourself to cross-
words. Sudoku, logic puzzles, riddles, word searches... any type of puzzle
that really engages you is going to get your mind working.
Whatever activities you choose to do to keep your brain stimulated, you need
to enjoy them enough to do them regularly. You can’t get your body fit by
working out three hours in a row and then ignoring your health altogether
for two weeks (because you’re so sore from the marathon workout that you
can’t move!). You benefit much more from working out consistently for shorter
amounts of time — for example, every day for 30 minutes, or four days a week
for 45 minutes each time.
The same is true of mental exercise. Your goal should be to make time for mental
stimulation at least several days a week, if not every day. If you can’t devote time
to working a crossword puzzle or taking a class every day, no problem. But don’t
let a month go by between mental workouts.Realizing Why Crosswords Fit the Bill
Working a crossword puzzle is all about stimulating your mind and testing your
memory. Any given clue is going to prompt you to pore through your mental
filing cabinet searching for names, places, events, foreign words, and other items
that you knew once upon a time but perhaps haven’t thought about in years.
Working crosswords on a regular basis can give your memory a boost for a
couple reasons:
✓ The more puzzles you work, the more you’ll want to rely on your own
knowledge base for answers (as opposed to using outside resources). It’s
simply more satisfying to pull the answer from your own brain than to pull
it from an atlas or a Web search engine.
✓ You’ll discover that puzzle constructors have certain words that they
like to work into puzzles on a regular basis. The more of these words you
commit to memory, the easier working crosswords becomes.