Hard graft, not genes.

From the New Scientist:

WANNABE rock stars: keep practising. Yet more evidence has emerged that musicians are made through training, not born with the gift.

We already know there is something special about the way musicians' brains react when they hear music. Now new scans have revealed that specific regions of the brain dedicated to musical syntax and timbre become even more animated than usual in musicians when they hear recordings of their own type of instrument.

Elizabeth Margulis at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville and her colleagues noticed the distinctions when playing music to flautists and violinists: only when the musicians heard their own instrument did these areas show this boost in activity.

The team reckons the musicians' intense training for specific instruments is responsible. If the brain's response to the music were decided by genetics, they argue, brain scans would be similar in all musicians listening to music, regardless of the instruments played.

Margulis speculates that other differences previously observed between musicians and non-musicians may also be due to training alone (Human Brain Mapping, DOI: 10.1002/hbm.20503).

"The suggestion has been that musicians have a different brain, but it doesn't seem they were born that way," she says.

Chess and the art of motorskill maintainance.

Phaedrus provided the following diagram which usually shows a clear correlation between rating and solving time. Michael Adams did this knighttour in 1.5 minutes while an 1800 player usually needs more than 20 minutes for it.
























For this knighttour you have to move the knight before your minds eye from a1 -b1-c1 etc. h1-h2-f2-c2-a2- a3-a4 etc. all the way to a8. Visiting all the free squares in the right order. The black pawns and the squares they cover are tabu. The black pawns remain stationary.

I solved this problem in 3 minutes and 50 seconds, which equals to a 2600 player. When I tried to figure out why I could solve this problem so fast, I realized I had played a lot of Troyis. Which basically trains the skill to move a knight in a restricted area of random shape.
The motorskills I trained with Troyis provided the speed and the visualisation you need to solve this problem. And that is exactly what you get for free when you train your motorskills: speed and visualisation.

The motorskills you learn while playing Troyis are not frequently used during a chessgame, so you cannot expect that an improvement will effect your play by much. So the problem was to identify the motorskills that play an essential role in our chessgames. With the aid of Phaedrus I found 3 essential areas:

• Target-consciousness. Scanning for potential targets.
• What do you want for Christmas. Automatic positional considerations. How to improve your worst piece.
  
• What does a piece do exactly. New: what does the piece do on its new square. Old: what did it do on the old square which it doesn't do anymore. Clearance: what square and lines are cleared by moving the piece and which pieces can make use of that.

Usually the amateur adresses these points with his conscious thinking, which is way too slow and error prone really. By transferring everything you can from your conscious thinking to your unconscious working complex motorskills you free up your thinking for more important tasks. Besides that, everything that is mastered with your motorskills is fast and you can visualise it. For free, without specialised speedtraining or visualisation exercises.


From a scientific article in one of my old posts:

In amateurs, "focal gamma bursts" were most prominently detected in the medial temporal lobe and in grandmasters researchers measured the bursts most often in their frontal and parietal cortices, parts of the brain linked with long-term memory and the ability to perform complex motor skills.

For some reason we always focussed on the long-term memory part and not on the complex motorskills.

These thoughts are the results of the complete overhaul of my ideas in the past weeks. I can imagine that I have forget to mention things. In case you find anything vague or inconsistent about this post please feel free to ask. I possibly left something out unintentionally.

Tussenrapport

Please all give a warm welcome to Phaedrus. He is not exactly going to be a Knight, but he acted as a soundboard for me the past weeks. The advantage is that we can speak in Dutch. I can express more subtleties in my native tongue. Take for instance the title of this post. Even after consulting a dictionary I didn't find a satisfying translation of the word. Other words and expressions like ijzerenheinig and "laten we elkaar geen mietje noemen" are not translatable either. Or even worse, their meaning is changed during translation.

The overhaul of my ideas the past weaks seems to boil down to the hypothesis that the difference is made during the scanprocess in the first minute or so. In order to optimize this scanprocess extended assistance from complex motorskills is needed. To test this hypothesis we are designing exercises to train the motorskills needed. The so called extended scandrills. I tried this road in the past, but due to lack of consistency of ideas and unsufficient overview over the matter that project failed. But now we are in a much better shape.
I'm trying to program a few drills with the aid of Zillion of Games, which seems to be well suited for the task.

I'll keep you informed about the progress.

A tribute to DG.

DG has decided to hang his pencil in the willows.
He sounds more serious than the previous time.
He has done a good job. Filling a blog with what you can find in the blogosphere is much more difficult than to fill it with your own ramblings. Over the years the blog developed. At first it was pretty much a national thing. The moment I joined the club it became more international. And lately it has become more regional. Which is logical since we copy the physical world into the virtual, where it can be manipulated easier. After all a man is, due to physical limitations, mainly a regional being. Since the internet with a global dressing.
It was interesting to see how the tone of the comments developed over the years. Gifted with a democratical sense, he allowed everybody to use the blog as mouth-piece. While only censoring the extreme. Allthough his posts sometimes stirred up controversy, he remained unshaken, sticking to common sense. A rarity these days. During the past years he has become a friend. Sort of.

His blog has become a monument of the chessblogosphere that will remain erected for years to come, providing historians with information and a good laugh every now and then. DG, thanks for your efforts. Rest in piece, my friend.

Update

Maybe you think I'm not writing about chess lately.
You can't be further from the truth. I'm overhauling my complete set of ideas with the aid of Phaedrus. We exchange e-mails in dutch, so it is possible to express myself more clear.
I have no time to translate everything on the fly for my blog. And it will be more readable after things become more crystallized.

Thanks Mark Weeks for mentioning me as a blog worth reading and nominating me for the chess blog awards 2007. I'm quite honoured.
Thanks to Susan Polgar to put me on her list as number two, the most importance place to stress number one. It created a spike in visitors of this blog.