![]() Maybe it'll help stave us Alzheimer's or dementia. But then the flip side of that is maybe just the opposite, maybe crosswords are not only not going to keep us from getting Alzheimer's - it's not a kind of meditative practice - but in fact may be its own form of mental illness.īLOCK: And we'll talk about that because you tried to debunk this notion, which is propagated pretty widely, that if you do crossword puzzles that it can help your mental state. You know, crosswords can be attractive because we think that they are helpful when it comes to mental health in all kinds of ways. That is my ambivalence about crosswords and that's what fueled my writing of this book. You're saying part of this is like sort of Zen but part of it is pure addiction. It's just something to do everyday because it's there.īLOCK: And Dean there are real tensions there in what you're saying. It is more honest though to think of crosswords as a habit, like smoking. When beautifully executed, a crossword can bring about the same response as a work of art. ![]() There are days when solving puzzles feels like a practice the next best thing to seated meditation. DEAN OLSHER (Author, "From Square One: A Meditation with Digressions, on Crosswords"): For those native to the world of the puzzle, entering a crossword is like stepping into the clean white cube of an art gallery or into a church or a Japanese rock garden. Here's Dean Olsher reading from his book about the allure of what he calls his magnificent obsession. Dean writes about what drives so many of us to fill in that black and white grid, how crosswords affect our brain or don't. ![]() Now he's written a book about crosswords titled "From Square One." He calls it a collection of dispatches from puzzleland. Dean used to cover arts and culture for NPR. If you are one of the 50 million Americans who are believed to do crossword puzzles on a regular basis, you have a fellow traveler in Dean Olsher. This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
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