New Year’s Word Scramble: Wednesday’s Words

Word Scrambles are not only wonderful ways to practice problem solving, word recognition, order/sequencing, and logic but they are also a great visual processing exercise.

In order to solve the puzzle, you have to “see” the word by rearranging visual data.    Confusing?   Pay attention to how you approach and solve the following exercise.   Think about what you “see”.

Pay attention to what you are “seeing” as you solve this puzzle.

What did you “see” as you solved the puzzles?

You can find more word scrambles and anagrams in our archives.

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.