Overview
Alphabetics are crossword puzzles in which you use all 26 letters in the alphabet, but each letter only once. The process of elimination helps solve these puzzles more easily than most standard crosswords (though alphabetics are not easier to construct). If you have solved most of the easy clues, you have only a few letters left for the remaining difficult clues. Rearranging them, as you would in an anagram puzzle, helps you find the words that match the clues to fill the remaining spaces.

 

Though these exercises appear simple, they stimulate many parts of your brain, primarily the left hemisphere's ability to think of (or say) a word that matches the meaning given in clue. Aphasia, the loss of some part of language ability, is suffered by about 40% of all stroke victims (especially right-handed men, whose language skills tend to be more isolated in the left brain than women's are).

  

 

The illustration above includes the locations in the left brain of two major language-skill regions, both first discovered only about 130 years ago. Wernicke, a young German doctor, identified an area involved in understanding the meaning of words. Wernicke’s aphasics speak fluently except that the words they use don’t make sense — in severe cases, they speak nothing but “word salad.” Some develop paraphasia, a tendency to paraphrase a word they just can't think of. Some can describe a situation but with tortured work-arounds because they cannot recall nouns (anomia). The sometimes-embarrassing, “tip-of-the-tongue” experience all normal people occasionally suffer tends to be caused by self-consciousness or emotional distraction or a great temporary “overwriting” by a similar but more recent event.

 

A few years before Wernicke’s discovery, a French physician, Paul Broca, treated a patient who could speak only the word “tan.” When he died soon after, his brain showed damage in the part called the left frontal lobe. The type of aphasia that interferes with a patient’s ability to recall how a word is spoken aloud, even though its meaning is perfectly clear, is called “Broca’s aphasia.” Tests of verbal fluency identify damage around Broca's area, as well as to temporal regions closer to Wernicke's area. In fact, damage to specific sites may cause problems retrieving the names for discrete categories of nouns: only animals or only tools, for example. The words for those things may not be “housed” in those specific spots, but those regions probably play an intermediate role in accessing them. Current electronic scanning technology can now pinpoint exactly where in the brain specific language skills are processed. For example, tests such as the part of the Wechsler battery that asks subjects to supply definitions for words (ranging from easy words like winter or keen, to harder ones such as travesty or prolix) cause areas in the left temporal lobe to light up, but not necessarily the same regions that light up when they're asked to supply categories of nouns such as the names of fruits or tools.

 

Some of the skills you’ll be using to solve the following alphabetics exercises are the same ones you need to do well on open-ended “fluency” tests that psychiatrists and neurologists use to assess possible brain damage. Those tests require the patient to list, in a minute, as many items as possible that fit a given category. For example, try to name as many mammals as you can in 60 seconds. Alternatively, try to list all the words you can that begin with the same letter or the same sound, s, for example. If you can correctly name 16-20 in 60 seconds, with no repeats, you are doing well; fewer than ten shows poor performance. Such tests show how well you can access the words in your own mental lexicon, not how big a vocabulary you have. High word skills correlate with both age and education. Command of words will tend to rise at least until the middle years (the 50s or 60s) and begin a slow decline thereafter.

 

Occasionally, poor performance on verbal fluency tests can be caused by damage to the very front part of the left hemisphere, further forward than Broca’s area. Why? The frontal lobes are generally involved in what are called “executive” functions - devising a strategy for achieving a goal, for example. When everything’s working well in your brain, these strategies may be so automatic that you are’t even aware of them. If you were asked to name as many animals as you can, chances are you’d come up with a bigger list if you proceeded through the alphabet letter by letter, naming animals that begin with each letter in turn (aardvark, baboon, chinchilla, etc.) or break the larger category into smaller ones (pets, farm animals, etc.).

How to Begin
Alphabetics are crossword puzzles in which you use each of the 26 letters of the alphabet only once. If you have solved most of the easy clues, you have only a few letters left for the remaining difficult clues. Rearranging them helps to find the words that match the clues to fill in the remaining spaces. Allow yourself 30 seconds per clue and try to fill all the words within the stipulated time given in the bottom part of the game. In this game, you put yourself in th role of someone who has to convey to someone else what object you have in mind. In effect, you’re forcing on yourself the kind of circumlocution some people have to resort to because of brain damage. It’s a real challenge!

Beware of Experimenting with Random Combinations
Mistakes can be costly because elapsed time is key to your score, If you enter two wrong letters in any one square, that square will lock until a correct letter is placed in another square in the grid. You can disable this 2-tries lockout by checking the box located in the puzzle.

Scoring
A timing clock starts automatically when you enter your first letter into the game-grid. It runs until you have entered a correct letter into each of the spaces in the game-grid. However, try to enter all the words correctly within the specified time. Your score will show the ratio of total correct responses to total possible responses. It will also show your total elapsed time.

Select your own Difficulty Levels
Each alphabetics is given a Brain-Gain Level of 1 (easiest), 2 (medium), or 3 (hardest). Click on one of these links to try games at the level you like. To make any game more difficult, try not to look at the Help links. But if you're having difficulty getting started, HELP #1 contains clues to the correct words and HELP #2 gives the correct answer to one of the clues.

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