Wednesday’s Words: Filling Your Categories for Better Word Finding

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.

Wednesday’s Word Puzzle: Brainy Word Searches

 

In a world full of distractions, it is important to be able to focus while sorting through hundreds of competing messages — all vying to be noticed.   Word Searches allow you to develop and practice both time saving and efficiency strategies that help you stay on task and see what is important.

This week’s Wednesday’s Words is a Word Search puzzle using words that you will find on www.craniumcrunches.com.  This type of puzzle is a great overall working memory, attention and focus exercise.

You can modify how you search in a variety of ways to work on different functions as well.   For example, if you want to expand your working memory skills, trying chunking groups of letters together as you search.   In this puzzle you have four words that include ING – SORTING, THINKING, REASONING, and LEARNING.   Scan the puzzle looking for words with ING.  

 Another strategy to cut down searching time is to search for a specific letter.   For example, this puzzle has three words that start with the letter C – COGNITIVE, CLUE, and CATEGORIES.    If you remember that you have a CO, CL, and CA, you can systematically find every C and search for the second letter of the pair to find the group of three words.