Neuroplasticity applied to chess thinking - by Nadia

The human brain is incredibly fascinating, especially its ability to adapt to novel situations and change its underlying structure to support new functionalities. The phenomenon of a brain changing itself is called neuroplasticity.

Scientists used to believe that our brains are fixed at birth, both structurally and functionally. Later it was thought that only children's brains were plastic, while mature brains acquired a rigid structure. Fortunately, these assumptions were debunked in the last decades, and while I could go on and on about the biological changes that occur in active brains, I will focus on the main message: Our brains are highly plastic and restructure in response to to our environment.

Like paths are made in nature, they are made in our nervous system. With this I mean that paths walked repeatedly will strengthen over time and the effort and energy put into walking the path decreases considerably (e.g. by removing overgrowth or flattening bumpy grounds). But the “paths” formed in our brains are actually much more sophisticated than a simple connection from A to B. Let’s look at the important features in more detail.

We will start this discussion by introducing an example. One of the first thinking structures that I learnt about in chess is to scan positions for checks-captures-attacks. The concepts are ordered by their respective values; checks are the most forcing moves and therefore should be considered first, then captures (material gain) and then attacks (gaining activity and initiative). Therefore this concept includes three locations and a directional path between them.

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