Did you know that playing chess, especially with strangers, leads to concentration, memory, and logic? This is explained by Pierre Petitcunot, amateur chess champion and math teacher, co-founder of a site to learn to play in 24 hours.
According to the 2020 World Travelers Magazine survey, chess is one of the top board games played by campers when they stop at RV parks and even bars. So, if you feel bored at home, hop into your car, hit the road, and meet strangers on bars and play chess. Don’t have a car or need a new one? If you plan to stay on the road during the pandemic, there are older car models you can buy through ZeMotors which is perfect for a rugged joyride.
Anyway, the results of studies on chess are spectacular. In particular, the benefits of chess on concentration, memory, and logic have been demonstrated (Mr. Noir’s thesis, Lyon, 2002) and this deserves a few words of explanation!
Next, we will show how to use the game to develop its creativity so dear to the world of work today.
Concentration works!
Michel Noir, in his thesis, has indeed shown that chess exercises allow working his concentration.
Indeed, when you solve a chess exercise, you place yourself in exactly the same conditions as in many other situations that require concentration: taking an exam, doing your job in the office, or even thinking about how to fix a water leak at home! We are alone in the problem that we have to solve and we must do everything we can to succeed.
The intensity of solving a chess problem is even much greater than that deployed in similar situations of everyday life. And the skills acquired through the resolution of exercises can be transferred and used in other situations.
The same logic to chess as in a math problem
Why is chess good for logic? Because a chess problem is approached as a math problem: you have to analyze the data and structure your thinking to develop an action plan. As Michel Noir says: “Observation – analysis – hypotheses – verification-planning – probability and calculation of variants – analysis of consequences – the whole methodological chain is present in this game.”
In particular, if you have difficulties in mathematics, this game can greatly help you! By its playful aspect, the game of chess puts all students on the same level of equality. Whether you are disabled, in academic difficulties, or if you simply do not think you can succeed in mathematics, you will develop a lot of skills without even thinking about it.
This is a great tool to reduce educational inequalities!
In fact, chess learning experiences are multiplying. For example, the foundation “the chessboard of success” intervenes successfully in sensitive areas, especially in colleges’ ambition success.
What about memory?
Memory has a very important role, that of receiving information from the outside world, processing it, classifying it, and eventually giving an answer.
It is connected to the whole human body: the information it receives can be of an olfactory, visual, tactile, auditory nature… And this information arrives in the first component of recollection: working memory also called short-term recollection since this information would remain there only about ten seconds before arriving in long-term memory.
When it needs to provide an answer, the working recollection receives two types of information: the information received by the body and the information given by the long-term recollection. By reasoning from all this information, an answer is given. Working memory can be considered the conscious part of the brain.
Working memory is limited
This is the key point and the main difficulty: working recollection is limited. If long-term memory has infinite storage capacity, working memory would only have five to nine storage units!
What is a storage unit? Well, it can be anything and everything: if you take the example of reading, it can be a letter or a word or a sentence or even a paragraph. This means that the more links we make between the objects, the more these objects will assemble to fit only in one unit.
How do you work on your working memory?
First technique, the more you make it work, the better it is. Many books offer small exercises on numbers: to remember a series of numbers in order is to use one’s long-term recollection. But to give back the same suite in disorder is to use his long-term recollection – his working memory!
Reading is also highly recommended because to make 24 letters go to different sounds together, one must use his memory.
And that’s where the game comes in! He also makes the memory work. Indeed, it is necessary to play together 16 pieces and pawns with different movements. Also, if you start learning a little bit about playing this board game, you realize that you can organize the game through different concepts. Again, to know what concept is used in which situation his memory works.
Block memorization
The second technique to improve memory is block memorization. We have seen that the number of storage units in working memory is limited, but these are not in size. Thus, making connections between knowledge allows them all to be in the same unit.
Let’s take the example of a server that memorizes a customer’s order: he will not occupy one unit for the customer’s drink, another for his dish, another for his dessert etc… If possible, it will form a block with the entire customer’s order and retain for example the “egg mayonnaise-beer-fries” set. He can also associate his appearance and the way he speaks. So when he thinks back to him, he finds the whole command at once.
In this board game, we reason in the same way. We look at how the Kings are protected from one block each, how the center of the board is constituted by a block. And the opposite part to the kings of a block for each opponent.
It has been shown that it only takes five blocks for a chess player to hold a position in less than three seconds! Be careful, if you place the pieces randomly on the board, it is no longer possible to reason by block and even the grandmasters can no longer hold the positions in less than three seconds.