Page 106 - The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin_Neat plip book

For much of this book I have described my vision of the road to mastery—
you start with the fundamentals, get a solid foundat ion fue led by

understanding the principles of your discipline, then you expan d and refi
your repertoire, guided by your indi vidual predispo sitions , whi le ke epi ng in
touch, however abstractly, with what you feel to be the essential core of the art.
What results is a network of deeply int ernal ized, int erconnect ed kno wledge

that expands from a central, personal locus point. The ques tion of int ui tion
relates to how that network is navigat ed and used as fuel for creative ins ight .
Let’s begin the plunge into this issue with ches s serving as a metapho r for all
disciplines.

The clearest way to approach this discussion is with the imagery of chunking
and carved neural pathways. Chunking relates to the mind’s abi lity to assimilate
large amounts of information into a clus ter that is bound toget he r by certain
patterns or principles particular to a given di scipline. The initial studi es on thi s

topic were, conveniently, performed on chess pl ayers who were cons ide red to be
the clearest example of sophisticated unco ns cious pat tern int egration. The
Dutch psychologist Adriaan de Groot (1965) and years later the team of
William Simon and Herbert Chas e (1973) put ches s players of varying ski ll

levels in front of chess positions and then asked them to re-create tho se
positions on an adjacent empty board. The ps ychologi sts taped and studi ed the
eye patterns and timing of the players whi le they per formed the t asks .
The relevant conclusions were that stronger pl ayers had bet ter memories

when the positions were taken out of the gam es of other strong players, be caus e
they re-created the positions by taking parts of the bo ard (say five or six pi eces)
and chunking (merging) them in the mind by thei r int errelations hi ps . The
stronger the player, the more sophi sticated was his or her abi lity to qui ckl y

discover connecting logical patterns bet ween the pieces (attack, de fens e,
tension, pawn chains, etc.) and thus they had better ches s memories. On the
other hand, when presented with rando m chess po sitions , with no logi cal
cohesiveness, the memories of the pl ayers seemed to level off. In some cases the

weaker players performed more effectively, because they were accus tomed to
random situations while the stronger pl ayers were a bi t lost witho ut “logi c to
the position.” So, in a nutshell, chunki ng relates to the mind’s abi lity to take
lots of information, find a harmoni zing/ logi cally cons istent strain, and put it

together into one mental file that can be accessed as if it were a singl e pi ece of
information.