Brain Wars

By Dave Munger | Seed Magazine

"Every morning around 9 or 10, I take a break from my work and do an online crossword puzzle. I’ve gotten pretty good at them: I can solve almost any puzzle without asking the computer for extra hints. I can even complete the extra-hard “Sunday Challenge” most of the time. But the question that has puzzled scientists for years is whether skills like crossword-solving transfer to other, seemingly unrelated tasks. Does my skill at crosswords make me a better writer, or help me remember what I need at the grocery store?

For decades, it seemed that the answer was, in nearly every case, “no.” In 1973, William Chase and Herbert Simon conducted a seminal study, which found that chess experts were better than novices at remembering the configuration of pieces on a chess board. But the effect disappeared if the pieces were arranged in a random configuration instead of a position from a real game.

Chess experts’ memory, it seemed, was better than non-experts’ for remembering chess games, but chess experts are no better than anyone else at recalling their neighbor’s name when they run into them at the post office."

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