This week’s Wednesday’s Words is a down and dirty brain exercise intended to help you combat the struggle to find the right word. Sorry — no fun and games this week!
The traditional view of memory was this: we have a huge filing cabinet that stores everything we need to know. According to this view, the filing system comes with an easy to use retrieval system that allows us to pull information out when we need it. Oh if it were only that simple!
We now know that we store information in classes or categories. We have spoken in previous posts about the benefits of chunking in increasing your short-term, working memory capacity. Long-term memory also uses a similar kind of organizational system – a concept called categorization. We store memories most effectively in categories and the deeper the category, the more likely we are to find successful ways to describe things.
Finding that right word or name requires a good, fully stocked storage system. The more pieces of information you have in a category and the more associations you have in that section of the filing cabinet, the better your chances of pulling something out that describes what you are trying to say.
This exercise will help you build broader categories. Below you will find a list of words from Merriam Webster’s list of most used common nouns. Challenge yourself to find 5 synonyms and 5 antonyms for each word.
Cranium Crunches 
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