Fascinating article about how the mind works and learns and remembers, and how people turn that into mastery in various fields:
The Expert Mind
Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well
It doesn't lend itself very well to quoting, since it's a six page article with lots of good points, but the gist is that practice is the most important thing to become truly skilled in intellectual efforts. It takes about 10 years of intensive, "effortful study" to attain mastery in a field, whether that be medicine, architecture, engineering, or chess. Chess is the one they focus on in the article though, for several reasons:
Because skill at chess can be easily measured and subjected to laboratory experiments, the game has become an important test bed for theories in cognitive science.
Researchers have found evidence that chess grandmasters rely on a vast store of knowledge of game positions. Some scientists have theorized that grandmasters organize the information in chunks, which can be quickly retrieved from long-term memory and manipulated in working memory.
To accumulate this body of structured knowledge, grandmasters typically engage in years of effortful study, continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond their competence. The top performers in music, mathematics and sports appear to gain their expertise in the same way, motivated by competition and the joy of victory.
Practice, especially the "effortful study" the article discusses, is what really makes a difference. It and determination count far more than natural ability, in intellectual endeavors like chess. The article mentions a father in Hungary who homeschooled his daughters with up to six hours a day of chess; and turned them all into masters. One is now the 14th ranked grandmaster in the world. So you either believe their genetics contain some super chess brilliance gene, or you conclude that any intelligent child could become a chess grandmaster, if properly trained and motivated.
The article tries to apply this logic to other fields, and I'm sure it would apply to mathematics and such, but I don't think it would work as well with the arts. Playing an instrument, yes. Composing symphonies or writing poetry, not so much. Practice and training would certainly help someone turn their ideas into finished products, but where would the initial inspiration come from? You could train someone to be a brilliant researcher and biographer, for instance, but more than likely their fiction would all still suck. Or is that wrong, and if they read tons of fiction, analyzed why stories worked, and wrote tons of practice stories of their own... they'd eventually be pretty good at it? (Counter example; many awful authors produce a ton of material w/o ever getting any better, and might in fact get worse as they work more quickly.)
How about sports? Practice obviously helps there, but if you're the most skilled basketball player on earth and you're below average height, you'll never surpass a somewhat less driven and less-practiced player with half a meter more height and much greater leaping ability.
There's lots of other good stuff in the article, including what they've found about how people think and store information. Chess masters don't necessarily see more moves than the rest of us, they just see better ones. Grandmasters have a huge accumulation of chess moves and scenarios in their heads, memories which enable them to glance at a board and compare the piece layout to the tens or hundreds of thousands of other chess matches they've played and studied, and from those applied memories they can pick the best option in just seconds. They're not Deep Blue, cycling through millions of moves in an instant; the human masters immediately jump to the best moves for a given scenario, and pick one of them. An intermediate player could study the same board for 30 minutes and see 10,000 possibilities, but not see the best moves, and perhaps not select them even if he did.
The analogy in the article is to remembering a poem or a song. Most English speakers hear "Mary had a..." and immediately and without conscious thought fill in the rest of the rhyme. If you're asked what color Mary's lamb was, you'll say, "white as snow" cliche without hesitation. This is because you've stored the whole poem (like it or not) as a chunk of info, and you can access it immediately. This is essentially what chess masters do with a grouping of pawns, rooks, and bishops; they've seen that layout before, or one nearly identical to it, and their minds can handle the multiple pieces and their possible moves almost as one unit, while beginners have to puzzle out every single piece individually.
The article talks about various experiments researchers have run with chess masters, and the interesting conclusions. Grandmasters can look at a board
from a chess match and memorize the location of every piece almost effortlessly, while non-masters can't remember half as many piece locations, even after longer study. However when the researchers tested the same subjects with
random chess board layouts, the grandmasters weren't much better than anyone else. The grandmasters' "chunk" memory of regular board layouts in chess matches didn't help with random pieces, and chess grandmasters didn't test much higher on spatial relations tests than regular people either. They just knew a lot of chess moves.
The challenge from the article is to figure how people learn and why some are driven to continually challenge themselves, while most of us are happy just being okay at things. Researchers are also working on the best ways to get people to learn. How can you make kids put effort into learning, rather than just sighing and turning the pages of their textbooks without absorbing the information? What's the reward vs. personal determination ratio? No one really knows, but learning how people think certainly seems to be a good start.
Labels: chess, intelligence
