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Dru Norris

How Scrabble Affects Cognitive Function

|Phoenix, Arizona

Many know Scrabble as an easy and fun board game played during rainy days and family game nights, but it is so much more than that. Every time you play Scrabble, it affects your brain in fascinating ways. By playing consistently, you are exercising the areas of your brain involved in visual perception, decreasing your reliance on language semantics, and enhancing your lexical processing and analysis skills, all of which are significant and applicable in everyday life. 

Scrabble is a board game in which two players strategically form and place words out of seven random letter tiles on a 15 by 15 board. The game objective is to accumulate more overall points than your opponent, thus winning. Due to the reliance on word recognition to win, Scrabble players are much faster at recognizing words and nonwords. This is because playing Scrabble alters the neural substrate associated with and supporting visual word recognition. This is supported by a study called "This is your brain on Scrabble: Neural correlates of visual word recognition in competitive Scrabble players as measured during task and resting-state" by Andrea B. Protzner, Ian S. Hargreaves, et al. who were able to demonstrate that consistent Scrabble players are much faster at word recognition than nonplayers through the use of fMRI machines and tests. 

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functional areas of the human brain

Scrabble players have also demonstrated a decreased reliance on semantics, the meaning of words, than non-players, which adds to their speed and overall skill at the game. This is because Scrabble players use different parts of their brain, in addition to the typical Wernicke's area, which is the area of the brain mainly involved in speech and written language recognition and understanding. The utilized areas are primarily associated with working memory, such as the superior parietal cortex, along with visual perceptions, such as the visual cortex. This has improved our understanding of how the human brain interacts with given information. 

Finally, another benefit of Scrabble is its ability to improve lexical processing and analysis, the process of breaking down and analyzing different parts of the given information, specifically text. Through repeatedly playing Scrabble, players learn to emphasize different types of information and utilize other parts of the brain during processing and analysis. In the aforementioned study, Scrabble players were found to primarily use prefrontal regions such as the bilateral anterior cingulate and the medial prefrontal cortex, as opposed to non-scrabble players who rely on a wider network such as the frontal, temporal, parietal, occipital, limbic, and paralimbic regions. By utilizing different brain regions, Scrabble players develop increased skills in lexical processing and analysis. 

As a whole, Scrabble is not only a fun brain game to enjoy with friends but also a useful tool to improve cognitive function. 


Learn more about the study mentioned in this article here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945215001069

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