Prof. Christopher Chabris - Cognitive Science Insights into Chess Thinking

Also, I think there's a second video on YouTube on similar stuff.

Again, people are passing the ball.

There's a gorilla coming.

But the curtain's color is changing.

There's a red curtain.

It gradually becomes orange, just as you mentioned, like gradual change blindness.

And many people don't notice that as well.

How does this relate to chess, by the way, Chris? So what about

chess? Well, I think...

I think part of it, there are many ways, I think, and part of it has to do with one of the unusual metacognitive features about this inattentional blindness, which is that we are unaware of it, right? Like we're aware that we can't fly.

And very few of us, unless we're like maybe very mentally ill or something like that, you know, at the moment would try to fly and only to discover that we can't.

But we're not aware of how limited our attention is.

is, and we're not aware of how much we don't notice, which is kind of natural, right? If you don't notice something, how could you be aware of it? It's a bit of a hard...

Intuitions for what doesn't happen and what you don't see and what's not here, those are very hard to develop.

I think those take a lot longer to sort of have an appropriate sense of what am I missing.

By

default, we don't seem to have that.

You know, the great cognitive psychologist, Nobel Prize winner Danny Kahneman, one of his clever quips was that the brain sort of generally tends to operate on the principle of what you see is all there is.

So you basically make decisions and process information and so on under the assumption that whatever you're seeing, whatever you've got in front of you, is all that's relevant.

It's very hard to stop and go get more information or ask if someone's withholding information.

So we have a bad intuition about how good our attention is.

This is why we will talk on the phone while driving or try to multitask too much, like listen to podcasts while we're doing our homework, while we think we're studying chess and so on.

All of that actually degrades our information processing capacity more than we realize.

So it's a metacognitive error.

We metacognitive means, you know, thinking about thinking.