Super Scrabble Players Have Unusual Brains 142
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.'"
Re:Definitely Effect. (Score:3, Informative)
Speaking as a seasoned Scrabble player, I think you mean "definately."
Re:What nonsense. (Score:4, Informative)
I'm a graphic designer, it comes in very handy. At work I catch a lot of mistakes that would have otherwise gone to print. Sometimes while quickly glancing at a page, incorrect words will just stick out to me, even without directly reading them. Sometimes we get medical terms or other words I'm not familiar with and the computer spellchecker doesn't have either, and I usually have a good hunch one way or the other.