Humanities Podcast Chess

Chess has been found to improve various cognitive abilities, including mathematical, verbal, problem-solving, and creative skills. The verbal improvement may be attributed to the split-second decisions made during gameplay, similar to language decisions. Chess also enhances reasoning and helps with learning steps in subjects like math. Chess players need a base knowledge of rules, openings, and tactical themes, which requires memory and pattern recognition. Reasoning is crucial in finding the best moves and categorizing opponent's moves can help determine the appropriate response. Chess offers a unique problem-solving experience and requires the integration of knowledge, reasoning, and emotional control. Making mistakes in chess can be detrimental if not managed properly. It is important to compose oneself and not let emotions cloud judgment. Hello and welcome to my podcast. I did my research on chess and its connection to emotion, memory, reasoning, and knowledge. I'm going to start off by talking about a study done by Dr. Robert Ferguson Jr. about chess and education and how chess can affect different areas of learning. Now, Dr. Ferguson found that chess improves mathematical, verbal, problem-solving, and creative abilities. And he expected to find the mathematical and the problem-solving abilities, but he was puzzled by the verbal abilities because chess, it's a silent game. It doesn't seem outwardly to connect at all to verbal abilities, so he was puzzled to find this here. However, I think the verbal aspects spoke to the split-second decisions that chess was helping them to train because when you're speaking, you're making intuitive split-second decisions pretty much the whole time you're talking. In chess, it might not be nearly as fast as talking, but you're still making intuitive decisions, and I think that that's what it was helping you train. I think that these intuitive emotional decisions are the first way in which chess really expresses one of my four concepts. These quick split-second decisions that you make just based on your emotions, your preferences for a move over this move on the board, I think that these decisions are really emotional decisions that you make on the spot, and that they're really similar to the language decisions that you make, and that's why the kids were progressing verbally as well as mathematically because that one was more clear. That was the reasoning. It was helping them work through the problems, and this reasoning was working through one step at a time. If this, then this, it translates pretty well to math. Especially since I think he was testing kids if they're learning like PEMDAS or something, that translates pretty well to, oh, if he moves his pawn here, I got to move my pawn here. If he does this move, I have to do this move. They work pretty well together, especially if they're still young enough to be learning the more linear kinds of math, which I think they were since they were still testing verbal abilities and mathematical abilities. I should check the study again, but no, I'm sorry. They were 16 to 18 years old, but I think my point still stands about reasoning and how learning steps could help with, at that age, maybe proofs in geometry or something. You use this to prove this. You move this here to affect this. It follows back and forth. If that one is clear, it's easier to understand. And this goes for problem solving, too. If you have to look at, say, a bunch of chess puzzles where you have to find a solution in a position, it stands to reason that you'd get better at doing other sorts of puzzles, too. That made sense to Dr. Ferguson. That makes sense to me. However, what's interesting about that is that chess didn't give them any of the knowledge to be able to be better at math, to be able to be better at those other kinds of problems, yet it still helped them get better. And knowledge is an important part of chess, too. It's tough to, even if you have all the problem-solving skills, all the intelligence in the world, if you don't know the rules, if you don't have that base amount of knowledge, you can't play the game well. You just can't play the game at all in that scenario. And that's why chess doesn't really show intelligence at all, because it's just about the knowledge. It's about the things you know. It's about memory. It's about pattern recognition. It's about knowing what to look for. And I'm going to get into that more as we continue. And right now, I'm going to focus on the knowledge. I'm going to loosely, loosely quote international master Levi Rosman in a YouTube video called Ten Chess Tips to Crush Everyone or something like that. And he said that you have to know your openings and know the plans that follow through from these so that you can continue into the middle game. You have to know the ideas. You have to know the themes of the position, the plans that generally come from these openings. And that's just stuff you have to learn. You have to read books. You have to play games. You have to talk to people who've already done it. You have to acquire the knowledge. No amount of problem-solving, well, problem-solving eventually once you start playing, but that's playing the games. You've got to do all that. You've got to acquire the knowledge. You need your base to work from or else you just can't do everything else. You can't use the reasoning. And you can't use the memory. You can't use any of your other skills unless you have the base knowledge. At the most basic level, that's just the rules of the game. But as you move up the sort of skill ladder, I guess, it would be openings, what moves to play to get a decent position. But more importantly, it would be tactical themes, tactical things like a fork when a piece attacks two other pieces and they have to lose one. You have to know to look for that kind of thing. You have to have the base knowledge that something like that exists out there. And once you acquire this base sort of knowledge, you can start to use your reasoning. First, you have to just commit it to memory. And that's the next big part. You have to remember to look for these things. You have to remember what these things are. You have to remember patterns. That's the biggest thing. You have to remember pattern. Pattern recognition is the biggest part of the game. Because the same things will keep showing up over and over again. And if you don't remember the patterns to look for, you're going to miss winning ideas, good ideas, things that just help out every time if you don't remember the patterns to look for. Even if you could find the right idea with your reasoning, it's like missing a shortcut. If you could have just known the pattern, you'd already have the answer. You'd have the answer sheet right in front of you. Instead, you had to go through and break a goddamn code to find the right answer when you could have had it right in front of you the whole time. And that's why memory is so important. That and remembering your mistakes so you don't make them again. I like Levy-Robinson's said, you have to know your openings. You have to know the plans that come from them. You have to acquire the base knowledge. You have to know these things. And once you do that, you can start to use your reasoning to figure out what to do next. That's where the game really starts. Or that's where you can start progressing is once you have the base knowledge, it's now a matter of using your brain to reason out what the best ideas are. Because just because you have the knowledge, just because you know what to look for, it's still like a big puzzle to find the right things to do. You still have to reason out the right idea. National Master Robert Ramirez has a trick to try and help and make it easier to find those ideas and what to look for. And he says to categorize your opponent's move. Is it an attacking move? Is it a defending move or a neutral move? And to know sort of what kind of reply to look for based on the answer to that question. And he says that if it's an attacking move, you should probably play a defensive move. You should probably respond to the threat. If it's a defending move, odds are you should go on the attack. You've got him on the ropes. You've got whatever. If he has to defend, then odds are you should keep moving forward. And if it's a neutral move, he says you should also start to either attack or start to set up an attack. Because you've got to get moving at some point. And if you sit around waiting for them to do something all day, eventually they're going to start attacking you. And then you're going to be in trouble. And chess is a really great outlet for reasoning. You can use it to explore all kinds of different ideas. You never get the same game twice. That's the great thing about it. It's always a new problem. There's always a new thing you have to tackle. And you're always going to have to reason something out, even if you've seen something similar to it before. It's always something new. There's more possible chess games than Grains of Sand or Atoms in the Universe or something like that. Most of them will never happen. And that's the best part about it. There's always going to be more things to discover. There's always going to be more games to play. And you have to reason it out in every single one of them. You have to try and tackle the problem every single time. But when you don't, you have to use your memory to add that to your knowledge. That's how the three all work together. You acquire the knowledge by doing or finding these things. You remember it. And then you apply it in your reasoning the next time you play. And the whole time you're using your knowledge and your reasoning, you have to contend with the emotional side of things, with the flow of the game. And really, the biggest part of the game where this could be a problem is if you make a mistake. If you were winning and now you're not, or oftentimes these mistakes just end the game on the spot and there's no coming back. But if you were up by a lot, and then you make a mistake, and now it's even and you have to restart, that's really the part where emotion plays the biggest role. Because if you don't slow down and compose yourself, the odds are really good that you're going to make that same another mistake, not the same mistake, but that you're going to make another mistake. Oftentimes, it's not the first one that kills you. It's the fact that you're frazzled from the first one. And then you just keep plowing forward. And you're like, oh, how did I make that mistake? And then you immediately do something much worse because you're still focused on the last one. And you need to be able to control this, to take a deep breath, to step away from the board, to do anything like that. It's really the one part of the game where you have to test yourself, test your nerves. And it's not really down to your reasoning. It's not really down to your mind at that point. Because it already messed up once, and it's going to do it again if you don't slow down. And that emotion, it's really, it's exacerbated in those moments. And we can get some good insight on emotion in chess from international master Jeremy Sillman in his two books, The Complete Book of Chess Strategy and How to Reassess Your Chess. They both have some good passages. In How to Reassess Your Chess, he opens up the first chapter by talking about how if you want to be good, you have to base your moves and plans on the specific balance-oriented criteria that exist in the given position, and not on your moods, tastes, and or fears. So in the first page of real content in his book, he is telling us to ignore our emotions about a position, and to look at it more objectively, to use our reason over our emotion. And it's really, it's a battle between the two a lot of the times in chess. And if we can trick ourselves into making blunders based off of fear, or like he said, taste, or mood, or whatever. And in his other book, The Complete Book of Chess Strategy, he talks about how it's important to step away from the board, to take a deep breath when you do blunder, when you do make a mistake, you need to, that's where I got my whole idea about how you need to slow the game down. You need to step away, you need to calm down, and let reason start to dictate your moves again. You need to start working through the position again, and you need to have a new perspective, and be like a goldfish, forget the last mistake ever happened. Forget the whole circumstances around it. If something's stressing you out, if it's a big moment, you just need to forget and focus, use your reason, use your knowledge, and your memory. You need to use all three together, because they really do work together well. That's really how it comes from. And coming back to the beginning, sorry, the opening study, Dr. Ferguson found that chess really does, or chess skill, really was an all-around, determined by all around, I don't want to say intelligence, but by versatility. There wasn't one thing, one topic that indicated chess skill. It's not like if you did really good in English, if you did really good in math, you were going to automatically be really good in chess. There was no topic like that. It was a combination of all of them. Just like I think a good play is often a combination of knowledge, memory, and reasoning. And when they all work together, it yields the best result. But even if you don't really care about getting good, chess is a way to explore reasoning. Even if you don't care about it, if you just want a good challenge, a good puzzle, just play a game. And it works really well to test your reasoning. If you want to try to acquire some knowledge in something, it's really easy. There's so many resources out there that you can use to acquire more knowledge. Even if you wanted to practice acquiring more knowledge, but you didn't have a specific thing, chess would be a great thing to practice on. Same with memory. If you wanted to practice remembering things, try and learn a new opening. Learn all of the ins and outs of it. It'll give you great practice, even if you don't care about using it. It'll give you practice learning it. And that's, I think, where we really see the depth of how far it can go. Even separate from how they work within the game, the game really works well at teaching these things. It can really show how to get knowledge. And I think that's where you really see its strength. That learning about chess can help you learn about learning how to acquire knowledge. It can help you learn about learning how to reason. It doesn't have to be about chess itself. It can be about the skills that you get from the game. And that's where we really see just how much knowledge there is in the game. Just how much memory there can be. Just how, well, the emotion's kind of separate. But it definitely is explored fully in the game. And just how much reasoning. You can practice reasoning, as we saw in the study at the beginning. That reasoning translates to other things. I think that's really the great part, is that just by playing this game, you get better at so many other things in life that are probably more important. So yeah, I think that's about it. Thank you for listening to my podcast. And see you in class.