More Neural Plasticity

 I just checked, and my fifth post in this space, was about testing my neural plasticity by switching to a left side rear shifter after 38 years training my brain for the opposite. It worked! I was just as shifty as I ever was. Then a bunch of stuff happening, like getting smacked by a car and a second later smacking my head far too hard. While I am still periodically made aware of the effects of the traumatic brain injury, I'd be an even more shifty and ungrateful person to not appreciate how well I've managed.

In late summer of 2022, I was receiving speech therapy, which still strikes me as an oddly specific title for what is much more general brain retraining. Part of the therapist's standard intake process was a survey of my general lifestyle, including sleep schedule, physical activity, screen time (he wrote typing on a screen), and leisure activities. The therapist's response to my answers: "Wow, you're doing everything right!," and part of that was my mealtime crossword entertainment, especially crytic crosswords, which I'd first discovered two years earlier.

If you're not an Anglophile, you might not be familiar with cryptic crosswords, and you might think there is a right and wrong side to using the road, rather than a right and left. A cryptic crossword clue has two parts: a typical, straight, standard clue, and a second clue of some variable sort of cryptic word play, and no, the solver isn't told which is which, but yes, they are fantastic training for flexible thinking, neural plasticity.

A few weeks ago I discovered a relatively new website with a back catalog of old cryptic crosswords from Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon, whose puzzles I originally found at The Nation magazine shortly before they retired from that post. Given the British background, American made cryptics are a boon, and not just as a way to avoid xenophobic tarrifs. American English, including spellings, is not exactly the same as English English (just plain "English"?), and I haven't YET graduated to the neural plasticity of working puzzles in two different versions of the same language.

Finished with breakfast this morning

The first cryptic that hooked me

took about two weeks.

Now, even with the varied instructions,

they take two days,

or about four meals.

I'm also not going to start looking for easy, easy French cryptics as way to sandblash the rust on that rusty, rusty knowledge. I do, however, enjoy that the recently discovered puzzles all have different instructions, so in addition to the traditional crytic ciphering (or cyphering for any Brits), I have the additional test of wrapping my plastic, hopefully not too mushy, brain around a new set of rules each time.  It's good practice for a boggled bean. And yes, my two rides yesterday were on two newer-to-me bikes that haven't yet had a rear shifter located on the left. Squish, squish, I can switch shift!

My scenic route to the South Hadley Library