Coded gray.
Pic of the day: Young Go players with singleminded dedication, from the anime Hikaru no Go. This anime turned out to be surprisingly accurate. Well, except for the part about the ancient ghost, I hope. The expert brainNo, I am not talking about myself this time. It is true that I have an inflated sense of self, but I could hardly call myself grandmaster of anything, except perhaps stating the obvious. And even there I have recently been humiliated by Ken Wilber, the integral philosopher, who points out things so obvious that even I have overlooked them. But enough about that for now. This entry was prompted by a feature article in Scientific American this August, mainly about grandmasters of chess. Chess is a very measurable discipline. Through their careers, players are evaluated by a formal ranking system and their status is continually tested with each new competition. If someone is considered a grandmaster of chess, there is every reason to believe they really have the qualities associated with the title. There is simply no way to cheat oneself into such a position, nor is it possible for people to mistakenly accord this honor to someone based on uncertain evidence. So now that we can study how living brains work, we should be able to figure out what exactly makes someone a grandmaster of chess. And the surprising answer: A decade or more of hard work. ***Generally it seems that the earlier someone dedicates their life to chess (or is dedicated by their parents), the faster their progress. As adults it takes longer time, the decade I mentioned above. It is not something that generally happens late in life, so we don't really know if it is possible then. What we know is that these people - and some experts in other fields as well - use their brains in a different way from other people. Most notably, they use their long-term memory far more actively. They have basically built up an internal database of knowledge which is extraordinarily large AND accessible. The article starts with a surprising statement by a grandmaster of an earlier generation: "I think only one move ahead, but it is always the right move." This, the scientists found, was exactly the case. The true experts don't analyze the situation. They recognize it. Because of their enormous active memory, they can see at a glance that this situation is the same as one they already know, or if it differs, in what way it differs. Of course, their choice is not ALWAYS correct. Otherwise a grandmaster would be unbeatable. But to anyone else, that is pretty much what he is. (Or she... while this is very rare in women, one expert father raised all his 3 daughters to become top chess players.) Intriguingly, masters and grandmasters show up at ever younger age. This could be a result of the more generic Flynn Effect, in which each generation is more intelligent than the previous, objectively measured by IQ tests. But the article implies that it could also be because children are encouraged to aim higher earlier in life. Perhaps the whole Flynn Effect comes from this? Anyway, not all children grow up to become experts of anything. Most of us don't. When people start playing high-level chess, there is no measurable difference in how they use their brain compared to rank amateurs. This goes on for a long while, but at a very high level the brain usage starts to shift to a new pattern. It was mentioned that it looked like long-term memory was used as a scratchpad, which seems impossible. I also doubt this. The more likely explanation is that the short-term "scratchpad" memory contains pointers to long-term memories which are so complete that they are remembered as one idea. Let me branch out here and talk about something not mentioned in the article. Usually I, like most people, can remember 7 random digits, or 6 if I seriously lack sleep. Some exceptional people can remember more. However! Some numbers which contain several digits are special to me, and I remember them as one unit. For instance 144125 is not six but two units to me: 144 (12^2) and 125 (5^3) are "special" to me. In contrast, 127 is not special and is simply a row of three digits to me. If your street address is "127 Piddly Road", then you are likely to remember 127 as one item. Well, to a chess grandmaster, thousands of combinations of chess pieces are evidently special enough to be remembered as units, recognized instead of cogitated. While chess grandmasters are the guinea pigs of this research, similar results are found in physicians (some of which can diagnose a patient correctly at a glance, literally, where a newly examined would need a lenghty interview) and even programmers. More intriguingly, it seems that music is the same thing. You do not need to be extraordinarily talented, or even above average, to excel in music. But if you are talented, you are more likely to choose to specialize that way. For instance, it was found that the best football players were usually born in the first quarter of the year. The earlier in the year you are born, the larger and stronger you are compared to your classmates, who tend to be born later in the same year. Therefore when you play football, you tend to get the ball and score more often, and so you decide reasonably enough that you have a talent for football. The statistics are clear: The talent of football players tends to be simply being born in January or February! ***There was one more noteworthy detail at the end. With ever more ever younger grandmasters of chess, and of everything really, the overall level of each discipline is rising. But there is one thing that is not increasing: Creativity. The masters of old may have had a lesser database in their head, but they compensated for it by using their knowledge creatively. Creative people are still born today, but they don't seem to make up a greater part of the populace than before. And this skill does not seem to be trainable with a decade of hard work... although it is unclear whether anyone has tried yet. Oh, and about that decade of hard work: Just playing chess (or the piano, or golf) for a decade will not take you far. What you learn from is doing something just outside the borders of what you already can. Then, whether you win or lose, you learn from it. At this point I vividly remembered the anime series Hikaru no Go, about a young boy learning the strategic board game Go (or Igo), which enjoys a similar popularity in Japan as chess does in Europe. We follow him as he gradually becomes a pro, and it is exactly this singleminded dedication that makes him grow so fast: Always learning from both success and failure. Perhaps we could do that with the rest of our lives too? Perhaps in the end we might become grandmasters of living! Could this be what the ancients called a "sage"? |
Visit the archive page for the older diaries I've put out to pasture.