What's a 6 letter word for recollection?

NO, THIS IS NOT MY HAND. BUT DOESN'T THE CROSSWORD LOOK HARD?! (PHOTO: SURELY)

I am paranoid about forgetting things because I do it all the time. If I don't write something down, it scuttles straight out of my head as my attention turns to what I happen to be eating or where I happen to be going. I don't think I have a bad memory per se, I just think I get a bit too lost in the moment. I'm always intrigued when I read something about ways to improve your memory, and apparently one of my pet passtimes does just that. Hooray. According to a big survey done in Australian Science Week, people who do crosswords tend to have better memories.

The survey gave respondents some straightforward memory tasks, then asked them to fill out a quick questionnaire about their daily habits. Turns out that the ones with the best memories were the ones who regularly did crosswords, had active lives, and ate lots of oily fish.

I love doing crosswords (not the big scary ones, just the potty easy ones in the supplements of The Times or The Guardian) but feel like a big geek sitting there doing crosswords on the tube when I could be reading a nice cerebral novel. But it appears that my crossword is just as good for my brain as your Cloud Atlas is. It also seems I can attribute having any kind of useful memory at all to my fondness for crosswords, and blame any holes in said memory to the fact that I can be a lazy lump and I don't really like oily fish...

Via ABC News.

Comments

[MT]

In support of your thesis, you seem to have forgotten that correlation doesn't prove causation.

[Sean Carroll]

I don't know; the boxes in the crossword puzzle pictured look pretty big. That means it must be easy, right?

[sara]

Oh, this rocks. I was in the states last weekend and picked up a Sunday NY Times and was feeling guilty about working on it instead of working on memorizing stuff for my big scary 6 hour comprehensive exam in 2 weeks. But now, I can tell myself that I'm actually training my memory!

And really, these puzzles really are mostly an exercise in memorization. My mom and grandmother do them all the time, and tell me that once you do enough you begin to recognize some of the more popular clues that end up showing up at least once a week, e.g. 4 letters for 'about' is 'inre'...3 letters for Minn. neighbor is 'ont', etc.

[Katie]

People need an occaisional bit of self-justification, just to stay sane. I'm not trying to prove a link between MMR and autism here, just trying to justify wasting time doing crosswords!