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Super Scrabble Players Have Unusual Brains
An anonymous reader writes "Being a competitive Scrabble player apparently warps your brain, in a good way, according to researchers at the University of Calgary in Canada. At the high level of the game, players quickly judge whether words, or possible words are real based in large part on their visual stimuli — not an inherent knowledge of the word or its meaning. 'These findings indicate that Scrabble players are less reliant on the meaning of words to judge whether or not they are real, and more flexible at word recognition using orthographic information. ... Competitive Scrabble players are visual word recognition experts and their skill pushes the bounds of what we previously considered the end-point of development of the word recognition system.'"
Does being a competitive Scrabble player warp your brain, or are those with warped brains more likely to become competitive Scrabble players?
Having read "Word Freaks - : Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players" you can see how the author starts with a writer's perspective on words, and through his attempts to become a competitive player he alters his brain. Towards the end of the book he is seeing anagrams everywhere and words become separated from their meanings...
"Jaxqiz" (n): An unlikely word that is only useful for playing scrabble with.
It's been a long time since I've had to see words as individual letters to understand them, even if they were unfamiliar.
And some of the people on the tv show where where unusual as well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoA1yer-CWI
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I've always wondered if cynical people have an unusual brain.
How is recognizing a valid word without knowing anything about it useful, outside of Scrabble and similar contrivances? I watched Word Wars some years ago about competition Scrabble players, and let me tell you, these are not smart people. They are people who have dumped all of their lives and meager talents into memorizing all the "valid" seven character patterns in English. They don't know meanings, they are not particularly literate, they just know what pattern of characters is valid and what pattern isn't. I don't think this is particularly praiseworthy, and to try to look at it physiologically as a special positive aspect seems to me to be in denial of who these people really are what limited abilities they truly have.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Is being a competitive scrabble player causing the brain to warp? Or is having this 'warped' brain a general advantage to becoming a competitive scrabble player?
I recently wrote an application to find the best location to play a word for scrabble thinking it would be an easy task, boy was I wrong. Sure, finding the highest scoring word for the letters on your rack was straightforward, tricky, but straightforward (the key is to think of the board and your letters as an organization of tiles rather than words). But then I wanted it to compete with an existing application like Quackle and I started to realize how difficult it would be.
Pro's are constantly analyzing the board and thinking about their opponent's next turn as well as their own next turn. On every possible turn they think about stuff like not leaving words that can be hooked with an 's', not leaving a rack with duplicate letters or a rack with too many vowels or consonants, not leaving words open to be played next to premium locations, when to play or keep Q's and blanks, how to be the first one out, and a bunch of even more complicated stuff. Oh, and don't forget that they still have to find all the words that can be made from their letters and the open locations on the board. Memorizing the better part of 180,000 words seems like the easy part.
The fact that pro's can do all of that in their head is pretty amazing. I have no problem saying that the top scrabble players are equal in their ability to chess grandmasters.
Apparently being a super Scrabble player renders a person unable to reproduce.
Or was it "unlikely"?
#DeleteChrome
that musicians hear sound differently. Duh.
couldn't help myself
We've all heard of the research showing that London taxi drivers have one part of their brain enlarged by their work.
More recently, research shows that this comes at the cost of reducing their memory for other things:
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/sciencetoday/2011/0609/1224298636027.html
Becoming a super-specialist in a very narrow field, such as a Scrabble master, might have the same effect.
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People who put more importance on how the words are spelled then[sic] on their meaning are actually at a disadvantage.
I wonder how many of them are compete[sic] poets.
...but can they put meaning beyond that of the words with[sic] resorting to anagrams and the like.
On[sic] interesting thing is it does prove that words are[sic] definite pasterns[sic] to them.
Captain Irony says: "YOUR HILARIOUS!"
Seriously though, if being a great Scrabble player is what they strive for then whether or not they can write gripping spy thrillers or complex technical documents is completely academic. Their brains are better able to spot patterns than most people's. If this were a story about 100m sprinters whose muscles were "better" than those of "normal people" would you be saying "Yeah, but can they run marathons?"?
There are people (evidently) who are incapable of stringing a sentence together. Some are incapable of spelling even the simplest words. These super scrabble players probably have useful vocabularies comparable to a "normal" person, but they are also able to spot patterns. If Scrabble is your game of choice, then yes, this is a Good Thing.
1) Memorize every 2, 3 and 4 letter word, especially those that use x, q and z.
2) Memorize all prefixes and suffixes.
3) Onomatopoeias are acceptable. (brr, brrr, kapow, whoosh, ooh, aah, etc) Basically most any "word" you will find used to verbally illustrate physical action in a comic book.
4) Familiarize yourself with words that contain a high number of vowels and consonants along with those that contain either no vowels or consonants. (aalii, cwrths, etc.)
The above basic tips will come in handy, and can usually net at least 3-4 bingos per game, if not more. However, the above tips can be used for virtually any word game. The next list is a more indepth metaguide to controlling the outcome of a scrabble/literati based game.
In scrabble, count tiles. Same principle as counting cards. In other variants, this may not be possible if the letter pool is randomized. If the tile pool is fixed and you count the stack, it's not cheating, it's called using statistical probability to your advantage.
Any chance you get, clog the board by playing a word that creates more words in 2 directions or more. For instance, in scrabble, using the X (8) points on a triple letter score (played in both directions) will net a minimum base score of 52 points. An example of this would be a combination of AX, XU, AT. Naturally, Z's and Q's net a minimum of 64 points. It's basically a free bingo to abuse at whim.
Depending on the complexity of the variant at hand, try to maintain a minimum average of at least 20-35 points per play. This is hands-down, THE quickest way to build up a decent score, so don't rely on bingos to pull you through the finish line. They're just icing on the cake.
Do not bother memorizing definitions of a particular word, but rather the fact that it is a word. If someone is hounding for a definition of an obscure or unusual word, tell them to consult a dictionary; That's why we have them. Any word game should have the use of a dictionary included by default, whether manual or automatic. Memorizing each individual definition is pointless, as it merely takes up otherwise valuable brainspace. Would you waste time memorizing each page of in a metropolitan phone book on the basis that someone could possibly ask you to recite the content of extraneous information? I didn't think so.
If your letters suck, don't be afraid to throw some (or all) of them back. Just keep in mind to remember your chances of drawing the same (or different) letters. This method will sometimes make the difference between a 10-15 point play or a bingo.
Whenever you get the chance, try to either hit two word scores simultaneously (8 letters), or have a word score tile go both ways (single letter prefix or suffix).
Build up a cutthroat, bloodthirsty strategy by playing competitively against yourself. This method of training is good as it also allows you to freely think from a completely objective standpoint, and will help you to build up a decent wordlist memorization by working at your own pace. If you play competitively against yourself, you should easily be able to hit a final score of 800.
If the variant is scrabble, and the score is above 500-600 (depending on your own personal preference) write it down on the scrabble lid as a badge of honor.
I wonder watching that old TV/television game show version show these too!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
*WHOOOSH!*
The real question is: is your in-law aware of their resemblance to the the gardener, the mailman and the poolboy?
would you be saying "Yeah, but can they run marathons?"?
Yes and I frequently do. I find it hard to believe that there is a situation where being able to run 100m in less than 10 seconds is a survival skill. But then I'm an advocate of letting the Olympians use as many drugs as they like to see what the human potential is (and what we can do for our soldiers when we colonize other planets), so maybe I'm not the best person to be actually answering your rhetorical question.
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
Super Scrabble Players Have Unusual Brains?
And Super Chess Players have usual brains? Of course I haven't read TFA, but really?
I find it hard to believe that there is a situation where being able to run 100m in less than 10 seconds is a survival skill.
It seems to me that running 100m in less than 10 seconds could be a great survival skill - akin to climbing the nearest tree in under 10 seconds - as we haven't always been at the top of the food chain.
More usefull in real life would be some poems
I think that I shall never see, /. post that tastes like brie.
a
I am kicking myself for posting this but....right now one of the tags on this story is the work "cromulant". That's spelled "cromulent", people!
What's not well appreciated yet is that the human brain is mostly visual, and so is human thought. It's also the most powerful way to organize memory. The primacy of "The Word," of language-type coding, diverts us from this reality. Yet linguistic meaning is based on image schemas which are predominantly visuo-spatial. However, there is some evidence that in humans some aspects of linguistic thought have been brought into rough parity with the visuo-spatial in terms of dedicated support in the brain.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Might be related to the skill that makes people good spellers. I know how to spell thousands of words whose meaning I am shaky at best on. And have always wondered whether that makes them part of my "vocabulary" or not.
It's good to see the fake-slashdot editor keeping up the tradition of posting dupes though. However, there are far too few spelling and grammar mistakes for it to be authentic.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I'm an advocate of letting the Olympians use as many drugs as they like to see what the human potential is
All you would prove is how many people would be happy to either kill themselves or else seriouslyu reduce their life expectancy in order to win a medal. There is a point at which the human body can't be ushed any further without damage. Given enough drugs, you'd end up with people finishing the marathon on bloody stumps.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The player's name wouldn't happen to be Abby Normal... would it?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Expert Tic-Tac-Toe players are very good at recognizing Xs and Os.
Bingo.
- Holy crap, I've got MOD points! Who thought that was a good idea.