"Or I put in a word like bristle - because it makes me think of a funny clue, like bristle can be both hair and to be angered. "Then I sit down with a pencil and an eraser and I put in a word like ‘winebar’ - because it’s an anagram of webinar which is the new craze these days. "I do have a whole stack of old graph books - like the sort of thing we used to have for trigonometry, and I just rule those up: I create 15x15 open squares. Designing cryptic crosswordsĪstle says he has an "old school" method for designing his crosswords. He said the Exeter study looked at thousands of people and found those who were both social and solved crossword puzzles were more likely to have minimal cognitive decline after age 70. He says another important aspect is solving puzzles helps build resilience and resistance to dementia. "The endorphins spike and the cortisol and the adrenaline drops - so there is this real general and genuine wave of pleasure." "If you solve a knock-knock joke there’s not real pleasure in it, but if the riddle takes a fair bit of thinking until you come up with that right answer I do believe there would be quite a bit of traffic and joy going on in your head. He also thinks the more difficult a puzzle, the bigger the payoff. "Puzzles, amongst other pursuits, remind us that we need to have the two in concert to have a fully functional version of the mind." You can’t have one without the other and too often when we go through life we either rely purely on intuition or purely on logic. "Puzzle play rewards both those modes of thinking. "What puzzles encourage us to do is to think in both a logical way and in a creative and intuitive way. If you can think in both those spheres, and have those two modes interconnect so that there is this constant crossover between the two, it creates a lot more agile and adaptive ways of not just solving problems but also living your life. but if we’re doing more and more of these sorts of puzzles like cryptic crosswords that dish up anagrams and homophones and puns, you can’t afford to think like that. So much of the challenges that we face in life we often tackle in the same default thinking mode that we may have. "What cryptic crosswords in particular and puzzles in general help us do is think in different ways. He has some suspicions about what they it will show, however. "It will take quite a bit to mine and to collate, because bear in mind 300 clues at various formulas - wordplay formulas, various timings in terms of when eureka happened or when bewilderment happened - there’s a whole lot of variations and permutations." He says the results of that study a couple of weeks ago are still being worked on. "These clues would just cascade along the screen and I had nine seconds to solve each one. "I had like an oblong mirror on my nose that acted like a periscope - like a rear-view mirror … so I could see behind me. "The actual hardware and nuts and bolts of it were fascinating - it all required a computer screen behind the MRI tube itself about 3m away so it didn’t interfere with the magnetics. "They were ecstatic when they saw these patterns because they were patterns that they hadn’t typically seen in other MRI scans. "It’s only in the past few years that we’ve looked fairly and squarely into the lives of the brain - into the neurotransmitters to actually see what the traffic and the fireworks are telling us," he says. Australian crossword designer David Astle.
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