Friday, March 06, 2009

Conscious transfer























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This week I have been busy with board visualization exercises. It is quite difficult to maintain a non-distorted picture of the board in my head. The details continuously fade away so I must constantly refresh them. My rule of thumb is that everything that has to be maintainened consciously by repetition has to be transfered to procedural memory. Thus freeing the short term memory for more intelligent tasks.

The brains are quite efficient and they don't like to transfer tasks from the conscious part of the brain to the procedural part. From our youth on we are much more familiar with rows and columns than with diagonals. This makes it much easier to imagine rook moves than bishop moves. Even the playing of a zillion chessgames doesn't inspire the brain to transfer the visualisation of the diagonals into procedural memory. Conscious reconstruction of the diagonals seems to be "cheaper" than unconscious visualisation.

I started to consciously "build" the dark diagonals in my head in many different ways. For instance by drawing a bunch of dark squares with my eyes shut. Or by imagining the dark squares on this board:























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Or by these exercises etc.. I even studied the diagonals when I was not to move during a chessgame. At the beginning of the week the board was a fading cloud of fuzzy squares while now some parts of the board have become persistent. I don't need conscious repetition to maintain these parts of the board anymore. The board even starts to have some resemblance with a square in stead of a cloud.

What does this tell us? The transfer is done in a conscious way with effort. Once the transfer is completed, the task is no longer effortful. (Quite) a few conscious repetitions are needed to hammer the task down. The transfer cannot be done in an unconscious way. That is why playing bishops diagonally in zillion games doesn't work.

The same is true for the pattern recognition department. The recognition of the patterns happens effortlessly, but the building of the list of items to be recognized requires conscious effort. Hence I tend to generalize this conscious transfer system as the main method to get things into procedural memory. To add some controversiality: it even points in the direction that a baskettball player should do better to make a few really conscious throws than to do the same over and over again automatically. But maybe I'm overstretching matters now.

4 comments:

  1. I thought your opinion on training of board visualization was of limited use. Have you changed your mind? I doubt whether most grandmasters have done a conscious effort on this area (which would not mean no one could benefit from it).

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  2. Papablanca,
    the chess exam revealed that I am relatively bad at calculation. So I took a closer look at what happens during calculation. The method I was advocating lately,was to create a list of patterns to be recognized by studying annotated positions. The problem is that this kind of pattern recognition only works for the characteristics that are on the board NOW. The characteristics of the future position simply aren't there yet. That is where visualisation kicks in. You must visualize the future position one way or another before you can recognize the future characteristics.

    So, I hate to admit it, but yes, I have changed my mind.

    I'm pretty sure that a conscious effort is the only way for plateauing adults to get any further. Brainmatters seem to work differently when young. But then again, I was pretty sure that visualisation was of limited use too.

    Opinions are of little use in the long run. So I'm going to find out simply by trying.

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  3. In Weapons Of Chess Bruce Pandolfini also mentions the importance of visualisation exercises. If i recall correctly he tells you he used to do visualisation exercises himself and that a good way to go about it is just before going to sleep in bed imagining for instance a Knight on a1 maneuvering it to every corner of the board. But you can do the exercises you mention too ofcourse. What was important (or so he thought) is that you do it just before going to sleep so that it will continue to work subconsiously or something like that. Personally, i found it a very interesting suggestion and i tried it too for a while. I really should start doing it again ;)

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  4. [1]
    TempoSchlucker, Interesting visualization exercise, a board of all shadeless squares.

    [2]
    CMoB, You are referring to page 260 in Pandolfini's "Weapons of Chess". I like your knight manouvering idea, but Pandolfini wrote of something different for the knight.

    Pandolfini says approx -- "Eyes closed (or staring at an empty board like in Amber blindfold), imagine a position surrounding a knight on a1 that makes the Na1 sensible-coordinated.
    Then repeat for squares b1, then for c1.

    GeneM
    CastleLong.com , for FRC-chess960

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