Page 113 - The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin_Neat plip book

whenever I crossed New York’s 33rd Street and Sixth Avenue, I zone d in on
some random car that wasn’t about to hi t me, and I saw it pas sing in slow

motion, then there is a good chance that one of thes e days I’d ge t hi t by
another car. In most situations, we need to be aware of what is ha ppe ni ng
around us, and our processor is built to han dl e thi s respo ns ibi lity. On the othe r
hand, armed with an understanding of ho w int ui tion oper ates, we can train

ourselves to have remarkably potent percept ual and phy sical abi lities in our
disciplines of focus. T he key, o f cour se, i s pr actice.

I. A technical example of how this might function in chess is for a player to consider a pair of opposing
bishops on a semi-open chessboard. There is a huge amount of information which is fundamental to
deciphering the dynamics of those two bishops—that is, central pawn structure, surrounding pieces,
potential trades, possible transitions to closed or open games or to endgames of varying pawn structures,
initiative, king safety, principles of interpreting these principles, principles of interpreting those
interpretive principles, and so on. For the Grandmaster the list is very long. For the expert, it is relatively
short. But more importantly, the Grandmaster has a much more highly evolved navigational system, so he
can sort through his expansive network of bishop-related knowledge in a flash (he sees bishop and
immediately processes all related information), while the expert has to labor through a much smaller
amount of data with much more effort. The Grandmaster looks at less and sees more, because his
unconscious skill set is much more highly evolved.

II. The brilliant neurologist Oliver Sacks has explored the imagery of shutter speed in an article for The
New Yorker and in other writings about the different perceptual patterns of his patients with neurological
diseases.