Aiden Rayner - Cracking Chess Visualization and Working Memory

Yeah.

There's so many things to talk about when it comes to adult brains and so on.

But returning back to visualization, because we also discussed recently with Nick Vasquez, right? I guess maybe he's also your student.

I mean, he was also a very big fan of separately studying visualization training, almost like a muscle, right? He was almost saying that it's like knowledge and muscle.

We need to also work on this visualization per se, try to see moves in two moves in the future, basically, force ourselves.

Yeah.

with some basic blindfold exercises and so on.

And that's also basically your claim.

Have you also seen similar improvements in your students across the years when you were giving them those exercises? Yeah,

absolutely.

There's sort of two speeds of improvement that occur and different people will experience different ones at different times.

There's this first, which is kind of that muscle metaphor.

I use that a lot myself, the idea of knowledge and the muscle of chess.

And there's this kind of muscle element that if you train your brain to handle the information required to follow several moves blindfolded or to put a position together when you can't see it and find a move when you can't see it.

on like a brain muscle level, even though you and I know that's a kind of an imperfect metaphor, but it's a general ideas on a brain muscle level.

Um, it's, uh, It's much harder to do that than anything your brain's actually going to have to do in a game context.

So when you've stretched your brain to handle all of that information, all of that stuff, and then you go back to the chess game, your brain's like, oh, wow.

You mean all I have to do is remember the bishop's here and the pawn's here? Heck yeah.

and says that that's a kind of like the stretching experience and that can um as long as other people the rest of their chess skills and spots are quite a few people where this is like their anchor skills i think it's holding them down but the rest of their game is better a lot of those people will find a jump of a couple hundred points very quickly um just by that kind of stretching element that's not the most common experience and the most common experience is a slower build as with anything in chess but um for some people this is kind of the Yeah,

I guess we'll come back to it because chunking is also a crucial aspect of, let's say, chess expertise and reducing working memory overload, right? Because people chunk certain informations.

So my also guess will be the same.

If you already have so many chunks in your long-term memories, if you already have so much chess knowledge, But maybe that visualization is actually something that is holding you back, per se.

So when it comes to that, I think you can definitely see a huge jump if you figure out that that's a visualization problem.

You basically miss out on certain moves in the future.

You can't see it clearly.