Word Puzzles and What They Say About Me

The word game ‘Connections’ is part of my morning routine – and an unexpected window into how memory works

I’ve learned a lot about myself from word puzzles. I’ve also learned much about how our minds work. Mine, anyway.

As you probably know, Wordle and Connections are electronic word games, published by the New York Times.

Connections is my daily addiction, part of the morning ritual. These days I wake ridiculously early, so I’ve plenty of time to meditate, do some yoga, drink coffee in the garden, and take the dog for a walk. When I was young, and adults would ask, “How did you sleep?” I was confused. Why wouldn’t I sleep? Not any more.

Connections is a great first stop on the electronic highway as you ease yourself into the oncoming traffic of the online world.

At 7am, the brain will take them as a pleasant few stretches and far more pleasurable than reading about what the world got up to during the night. (No good, usually.)

When first confronted by the 16 words to be linked together, I was baffled. It took a while, but it was a new thing to learn and I’m much better now, if I don’t get too many Americanisms. Baseball and food are particularly impossible. I can never get over the many weird dishes and their weirder names that the Yanks have.

Our family group is divided on whether it’s fair to look up a word you don’t know at all. Some maintain it’s cheating. Some probably do it anyway and keep schtum.

When I’ve successfully, or not, sorted all the words into their little colour-coded boxes – Oscar winners, types of dog, music terms, barbecue sauces (you see!) – I can get on with the day. First, I post it on the aforementioned family group, but only if I win.

It’s chastening to realise that I’m far from the best in this group. If I was in school, they would be worried about me. “That’s two in a row,” they would say in the common room. “He’s struggling.”

Memory is strange, elusive, and the more you try to capture it, the sooner it squirms away. When I unload the dishwasher and put things away in drawers, everything goes where it should. Yet if I was in a different room and you asked me which drawer the small pots went in, I couldn’t tell you.

If I’m away from the office and somebody rings me for one of the computer passwords, I rarely know it – yet when I’m at the desk, I breeze through them at speed. The combination of triggering, muscle memory, and the subconscious mind is stronger than I am, and more wily.

As I get older, I often find myself dwelling on the things I said and did when I was much younger. I cannot, after the initial wince of recall, blame myself too much. My mind was much sharper then; I could learn a role in a play practically overnight. But off-stage, I hadn’t put in the hours that make for easy social encounters.

If I’m baffled by why I put myself in so many daft situations, or said things I definitely shouldn’t have said, and probably didn’t mean, I know now that I was building the emotional intelligence that gets you through life. It’s as futile to blame your younger self for not knowing what you know now as berating yourself for not having today’s Lotto numbers yesterday.

Connections reveals another weird thing about the brain. While, like I said, it’s usually a pleasant way to start the day, sometimes I can scan it in the morning and not have a clue. It’s nonsense, I think, I’m going to give it up and never do it again. If it was on paper, I’d throw it across the room.

Then I give it one more go at lunchtime and it makes perfect sense: Breeds of cats, triangular objects, ‘sound like names’ aloud, and ‘hidden’ American Presidents. Easy. I don’t know any more than I did in the morning, but while I was getting on with the day, the meetings, the consultations, driving, talking, unloading the bloody dishwasher, my subconscious was whizzing away in the background, arranging it all. How’s that for a connection?