Love Wordle? Cryptic Crosswords Will Only Feed Your Addiction

In the mid-1980s, there was an article in this masthead next to the cryptic crossword on how to attempt to decipher this type of puzzle. Thanks to that inspiration, I have now completed cryptic crosswords for nearly 40 years: individually, with colleagues, friends, partner and husband.

You’ve seen them. At work, on holiday, waiting for an appointment, at the airport, at home. Solvers flexing their brain organ, pumping muscle tissue. Why? To stretch their mind and its boundaries. To acquire knowledge out of their usual comfort zones. To challenge their brain with new information. And, as I’ve become more senior and frail, these crosswords still sing to me.

In our new world, of so many notifications sent our way, in all its different media, mediums and devices, we are encouraged to skim in our “fomo” for information. Enter the cryptic crossword, promoting a sense of stillness and mindfulness through the required focus and concentration.

We live in an age where reading between the lines and beyond the words should be more relied upon to understand the true intent of the scribe.

We know that having fun makes learning easier. And that in many jobs, there is less time to connect in a personal way. Cryptic crosswords provide a connection between colleagues beyond their work, during coffee breaks, lunches and snippets of time where one needs to think of something else.

I taught for 33 years in government secondary schools, and one end-of-year activity with me was students learning to decipher clues and write their own cryptic crosswords.

The sparkle in the eye when an answer is recognised is a connection made, in the relationship and in the brain. The sense of achievement upon completion of an entire cryptic crossword is the ultimate goal for all solvers.

It’s teamwork that promotes a healthy culture of learning and problem-solving together.

It can identify how someone thinks, which can be very beneficial when certain roles or situations arise in the work environment and a certain thinking style and performance is needed.

The easier cryptic crosswords can be completed with assistance from companion clues in the neighbouring Quick crossword. Then there’s the cryptic with setter’s initials so that you know who it is you are tackling. Then there are ones with no setter initials, leaving you none the wiser where they might be coming from.

Reading the setter, understanding their character and decoding how someone thinks is a large part of what it is about. The setter’s character, their backstory or stem, and where they are coming from are crucial in the speed and mind frame you choose as the solver to determine the answers.

Solving cryptic posers teach you about yourself and those around you attempting to crack the code. It shines a light on how you best problem-solve and in which areas you could improve. Alone, with others, when in a relaxed environment, when pressed for time, under pressure.

You don’t know what you might learn about yourself, others and the world. May cryptics provide you with many years of joy.

By : Shirley Barbara-Heyworth

Source: Love Wordle? Cryptic crosswords will only feed your addiction

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Whether to take your mind off work at the end of a long day, or to just take a mental break over lunch, tackling a cryptic crossword is a great way to unwind with something that is both fun and challenging!

The difference between a cryptic crossword and a regular crossword is that the route to finding solutions to a cryptic crossword is more convoluted. Whereas a regular crossword is a straightforward exercise in thinking of synonyms – words with similar meanings to those in the clues, it’s not clear initially with a cryptic crossword what part of each clue you need to find a synonym for.

And when you work that out, the answer you come up with has to fit with all the other parts of the clue. But the more you do them, the easier it becomes because you get to know the setter’s style. This is why many people often have a preferred crossword in a particular newspaper or magazine.

If you’re not used to doing crosswords, then you might want to get used to thinking about synonyms by doing regular crosswords first, and then working your way towards the cryptic sort.

There’s also a more serious side to crosswords. Along with other cognitive activities such as learning a new language, playing a musical instrument, or playing cards, doing crosswords is one of the brain-training skills that is thought to help reduce the risk of dementia and delay its symptoms.

By keeping the brain active as we get older, scientists think that we might be able to reduce the amount of brain cell damage associated with dementia and even grow new connections between brain cells.

Doing crosswords, therefore, might help your brain keep working better for longer.1 So instead of turning on the tv or watching TikTok, get out a crossword and get that grey matter working!

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Mental Models: How to Train Your Brain to Think in New Ways

You can train your brain to think better. One of the best ways to do this is to expand the set of mental models you use to think. Let me explain what I mean by sharing a story about a world-class thinker.

I first discovered what a mental model was and how useful the right one could be while I was reading a story about Richard Feynman, the famous physicist. Feynman received his undergraduate degree from MIT and his Ph.D. from Princeton. During that time, he developed a reputation for waltzing into the math department and solving problems that the brilliant Ph.D. students couldn’t solve.

When people asked how he did it, Feynman claimed that his secret weapon was not his intelligence, but rather a strategy he learned in high school. According to Feynman, his high school physics teacher asked him to stay after class one day and gave him a challenge.

“Feynman,” the teacher said, “you talk too much and you make too much noise. I know why. You’re bored. So I’m going to give you a book. You go up there in the back, in the corner, and study this book, and when you know everything that’s in this book, you can talk again.” 1

So each day, Feynman would hide in the back of the classroom and study the book—Advanced Calculus by Woods—while the rest of the class continued with their regular lessons. And it was while studying this old calculus textbook that Feynman began to develop his own set of mental models.

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What users *think* they know about your system will determine how they interact with the design. Understand users’ mental models to design something that’ll work well in practice. #UX #mentalmodels #userpsychology #HCI

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“That book showed how to differentiate parameters under the integral sign,” Feynman wrote. “It turns out that’s not taught very much in the universities; they don’t emphasize it. But I caught on how to use that method, and I used that one damn tool again and again. So because I was self-taught using that book, I had peculiar methods of doing integrals.”

“The result was, when the guys at MIT or Princeton had trouble doing a certain integral, it was because they couldn’t do it with the standard methods they had learned in school. If it was a contour integration, they would have found it; if it was a simple series expansion, they would have found it. Then I come along and try differentiating under the integral sign, and often it worked. So I got a great reputation for doing integrals, only because my box of tools was different from everybody else’s, and they had tried all their tools on it before giving the problem to me.” 2

Every Ph.D. student at Princeton and MIT is brilliant. What separated Feynman from his peers wasn’t necessarily raw intelligence. It was the way he saw the problem. He had a broader set of mental models.

What is a Mental Model?

A mental model is an explanation of how something works. It is a concept, framework, or worldview that you carry around in your mind to help you interpret the world and understand the relationship between things. Mental models are deeply held beliefs about how the world works.

For example, supply and demand is a mental model that helps you understand how the economy works. Game theory is a mental model that helps you understand how relationships and trust work. Entropy is a mental model that helps you understand how disorder and decay work.

Mental models guide your perception and behavior. They are the thinking tools that you use to understand life, make decisions, and solve problems. Learning a new mental model gives you a new way to see the world—like Richard Feynman learning a new math technique.

Mental models are imperfect, but useful. There is no single mental model from physics or engineering, for example, that provides a flawless explanation of the entire universe, but the best mental models from those disciplines have allowed us to build bridges and roads, develop new technologies, and even travel to outer space. As historian Yuval Noah Harari puts it, “Scientists generally agree that no theory is 100 percent correct. Thus, the real test of knowledge is not truth, but utility.”

The best mental models are the ideas with the most utility. They are broadly useful in daily life. Understanding these concepts will help you make wiser choices and take better actions. This is why developing a broad base of mental models is critical for anyone interested in thinking clearly, rationally, and effectively.

The Secret to Great Thinking and Decision Making

Expanding your set of mental models is something experts need to work on just as much as novices. We all have our favorite mental models, the ones we naturally default to as an explanation for how or why something happened. As you grow older and develop expertise in a certain area, you tend to favor the mental models that are most familiar to you.

Here’s the problem: when a certain worldview dominates your thinking, you’ll try to explain every problem you face through that worldview. This pitfall is particularly easy to slip into when you’re smart or talented in a given area.

The more you master a single mental model, the more likely it becomes that this mental model will be your downfall because you’ll start applying it indiscriminately to every problem. What looks like expertise is often a limitation. As the common proverb says, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” 3

When a certain worldview dominates your thinking, you’ll try to explain every problem you face through that worldview.

Consider this example from biologist Robert Sapolsky. He asks, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” Then, he provides answers from different experts.

  • If you ask an evolutionary biologist, they might say, “The chicken crossed the road because they saw a potential mate on the other side.”
  • If you ask a kinesiologist, they might say, “The chicken crossed the road because the muscles in the leg contracted and pulled the leg bone forward during each step.”
  • If you ask a neuroscientist, they might say, “The chicken crossed the road because the neurons in the chicken’s brain fired and triggered the movement.”

Technically speaking, none of these experts are wrong. But nobody is seeing the entire picture either. Each individual mental model is just one view of reality. The challenges and situations we face in life cannot be entirely explained by one field or industry.

All perspectives hold some truth. None of them contain the complete truth.

Relying on a narrow set of thinking tools is like wearing a mental straitjacket. Your cognitive range of motion is limited. When your set of mental models is limited, so is your potential for finding a solution. In order to unleash your full potential, you have to collect a range of mental models. You have to build out your decision making toolbox. Thus, the secret to great thinking is to learn and employ a variety of mental models.

Expanding Your Set of Mental Models

The process of accumulating mental models is somewhat like improving your vision. Each eye can see something on its own. But if you cover one of them, you lose part of the scene. It’s impossible to see the full picture when you’re only looking through one eye.

Similarly, mental models provide an internal picture of how the world works. We should continuously upgrade and improve the quality of this picture. This means reading widely from the best books, studying the fundamentals of seemingly unrelated fields, and learning from people with wildly different life experiences. 4

The mind’s eye needs a variety of mental models to piece together a complete picture of how the world works. The more sources you have to draw upon, the clearer your thinking becomes. As the philosopher Alain de Botton notes, “The chief enemy of good decisions is a lack of sufficient perspectives on a problem.”

The Pursuit of Liquid Knowledge

In school, we tend to separate knowledge into different silos—biology, economics, history, physics, philosophy. In the real world, information is rarely divided into neatly defined categories. In the words of Charlie Munger, “All the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department.” 5

World-class thinkers are often silo-free thinkers. They avoid looking at life through the lens of one subject. Instead, they develop “liquid knowledge” that flows easily from one topic to the next.

This is why it is important to not only learn new mental models, but to consider how they connect with one another. Creativity and innovation often arise at the intersection of ideas. By spotting the links between various mental models, you can identify solutions that most people overlook.

Tools for Thinking Better

Here’s the good news:

You don’t need to master every detail of every subject to become a world-class thinker. Of all the mental models humankind has generated throughout history, there are just a few dozen that you need to learn to have a firm grasp of how the world works.

Many of the most important mental models are the big ideas from disciplines like biology, chemistry, physics, economics, mathematics, psychology, philosophy. Each field has a few mental models that form the backbone of the topic. For example, some of the pillar mental models from economics include ideas like Incentives, Scarcity, and Economies of Scale.

If you can master the fundamentals of each discipline, then you can develop a remarkably accurate and useful picture of life. To quote Charlie Munger again, “80 or 90 important models will carry about 90 percent of the freight in making you a worldly-wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.” 6

I’ve made it a personal mission to uncover the big models that carry the heavy freight in life. After researching more than 1,000 different mental models, I gradually narrowed it down to a few dozen that matter most. I’ve written about some of them previously, like entropy and inversion, and I’ll be covering more of them in the future. If you’re interested, you can browse my slowly expanding list of mental models.

My hope is to create a list of the most important mental models from a wide range of disciplines and explain them in a way that is not only easy to understand, but also meaningful and practical to the daily life of the average person. With any luck, we can all learn how to think just a little bit better.

James Clear

 

By: James Clear

 

Source: Mental Models: How to Train Your Brain to Think in New Ways

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5-Minute Tools to Clear Your Mind

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In the hustle and bustle of today’s world, it is far too easy to get lost in your own mind, weighed down by the pile of thoughts about work, relationships, technology, and your social life. When there are a million different things that are all begging for your attention, it is easy to forget to take a moment for yourself and clear your head. Doing this can be hard, though. Sometimes, it feels like we need an entire day to fully recharge our batteries. While this might be the case, there are some ways to quickly bring your mind to a state of relaxation and help you get focused. Here are some 5-minute tools to clear your mind…

5-Minute Tools to Clear Your Mind

Mindfulness Meditation

Meditation is more of a skill than an activity, especially if you are trying to do it in a quick 5-minute period. However, learning to quickly put your mind in a state of meditation can help calm your nerves and focus your mind. Of all types of meditation, , as it helps bring your mind inward and helps you focus on your body and mind in a hyper-attentive way.

5-Minute Tools to Clear Your Mind

Step Outside for a Moment

If you’re ever feeling stressed or anxious, it’s worth it to take a step outside. Studies have shown that simply being outdoors , including reduce stress, reduce the effects of depression, and improve mental capacity. When things are getting busy and hectic in the office, taking a quick moment for yourself outside can help you calm yourself and put your mind in a clear and productive space. Obviously, it would be ideal to be in a greener, more natural area, but even just the fresh air can do wonders for your mind.

5-Minute Tools to Clear Your Mind

Stretch

If you are feeling tense and anxious, it’s important to remember that your physical well-being is probably feeding directly into your mental well-being. Because of this, when things get really stressful in life, remember to take a few minutes during the day to stretch your muscles and limbs. This helps relieve tension throughout your body, and can help prevent your muscles from tightening up, due to anxiety. A nice stretch will leave your mind feeling more refreshed and ready to take on the other tasks throughout the day.

5-Minute Tools to Clear Your Mind

Do Something Active

If you’ve been working on mental tasks all day, then your body is probably restless and your mind is getting worn down. To help achieve some balance, and to give your body a boost of endorphins that help you wake up and get focused, take some time to do something active. Go on a quick little run, play a game, or even just take a brief walk. Just make sure that it’s something active that gets you up on your feet.

5-Minute Tools to Clear Your Mind

Breathing Exercises

If you’re feeling incredibly anxious and stressed, then take a moment to do some simple breathing exercises. The simplest way to do this is to simply take deep breaths inwards and outwards, and to count the time in between each breath, all while focusing on a focal point in the distance. However, there are a wide variety of breathing exercises that you can look up to determine what works best for you.

10 Relaxation and Meditation Tips for the Busy Mom  

Have a Dedicated Space

Whether at work or at home, it’s nice to have an area that is specifically geared towards helping your mind think clearly. This can be a variety of things, whether it is an area that you walk to, a meditation spot, or even that is set up to cater to your specific needs. This space should be free from distractions, or at least the things that will distract you, and should be designated specifically to either do mental tasks or simply to clear your mind.

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Source: https://www.urbannaturale.com/clear-your-mind-5-minute-tools/

 

What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About Compassion – Carolyn Gregoire

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Mounting evidence of the impact of contemplative practices like meditation (which we now know can, quite literally, rewire the brain) are finally bringing modern science up to speed with ancient wisdom. Mindfulness and compassion — the practices of cultivating a focused awareness on the present moment, and extending a loving awareness to others — are part of every religion and wisdom tradition, and we’re at last beginning to understand the profound impact that they have on the brain, says psychiatrist and mindfulness expert Dr. Dan Siegel………..

Read more: http://sco.lt/9FLw5R

 

 

 

 

 

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