Thinking like a Scrabble pro
Study of elite players could help individuals with brain injuries
CALGARY When competitive Scrabble player Randall Thomas eyes his rack of seven letters, he’s not analyzing language, meaning, even letter sounds.
After more than 25 years of repetitive training, he relies almost solely on his memory, and whether any combination of letters that he’s seen myriad times before will get him the highest possible score.
“Even when I’m just wandering around at Scrabble competitions, I’ll glance at the racks of other players’ arranged in all different ways, and I will just see the word on that rack,” said Thomas, a former western Canadian champion.
It’s a unique way of looking at language a researcher at the University of Calgary hopes can help retrain different networks of the brain — a concept that could be especially valuable in helping heal brain injuries.
Sophia Van Hees, a U of C brain and language researcher and post-doctoral scholar, says elite Scrabble players have put themselves through years of highly-specialized training. By using brain imaging, she hopes to map the impact of that training on their neural networks.
“These players are such a rich data source because they’ve already done so much training in something called visual lexicon decision-making, where they create words from Scrabble tiles and try to make quick decisions about those words,” Van Hees said.
“We found they’re not necessarily using the language network of their brains, instead they’re engaging visual memory and it becomes more of a perceptual task.”
Using both functional MRI and EEG to image the brain, researchers found elite Scrabble players were much faster at identifying real words from made-up words. Researchers also discovered that instead of employing the brain’s language networks for the task, like untrained casual players, elite Scrabble players instead used the brain’s visual processing centres.
Van Hees is now researching a group of casual Scrabble players, to see whether their own language networks and visual memory changes as they play more games.
Those findings will be compared with the elite Scrabble group, Van Hees said, with an aim to better understand the learning mechanisms of the brain and how parts that are damaged can be compensated for.
This research could be especially important as our seniors populations grow larger, she added, and the incidence of stroke and dementia continue to rise.
Dr. Peter Sargious, a general internist and assistant dean at the U of C’s continuing medical education department at the Cumming School of Medicine, says when he played Scrabble competitively, he also practised a repetitive set of tasks that called on memory and decision-making.
“And I do think there is a fascinating potential to look at neuroplasticity, and see once you’ve lost certain neurons you can still access other neurons and use them differently so they can adequately mimic what you’ve lost.”
The Scrabble study is headed by Van Hees’ co-supervisors: Penny Pexman, a professor in the department of psychology, member of the Hotchkiss Brain Institute (HBI) and director of the language processing lab, and Andrea Protzner, assistant professor in psychology, member of HBI and director of the brain dynamics lab.
We found they’re not necessarily using the language network of their brains, instead they’re engaging visual memory.