Chess Player – Secrets Behind the Brain

The brain is the center of the nervous system that exists in all vertebrates and most of the invertebrate animals. It contains over 15 to 33 billion neurons and controls the other organ systems of the body. Over the many past years many studies have been done to understand the workings of the brain and even in this day and age, we don’t have enough information to come up with a plausible and accurate understanding. We all use our brains but some are able to tap into its magnificent power better than the rest like a skilled chess player.

It has been found out through various studies that a grandmaster level chess player was able to utilize different parts of the brain than a normal player when mentally perceiving the next move. In an earlier study that took place in 1991, about 10 grandmasters were chosen to partake in an experiment to understand the brain activity that occurs during a game of chess. A magnetic imaging technique was used to measure the gamma band activity in the brain.

Through the experiment they were able to prove that the gamma burst were occurring more in the frontal and parietal lobe in the grandmaster chess player than in the brain of an amateur one. It was then proposed that the thousands of potential moves memorized by the grandmaster chess player helped the chess player to recognize potential problems and find the respective solutions from their memories quite easily.

There have been recent studies too which indicated that an excellent chess player is able to engage both sides of their brains while playing. Eight international and eight amateur chess players were included in the experiment which used a functional magnetic resonance imaging to find out that while the skilled chess player used both sides of the brain, the amateur chess player only used one side.

But the good news is that anyone can attain such levels through hard practice. All of us are wired differently but the common element in everyone is the all powerful brain and its untapped potential. Shortly put, if a chess player can do it, so can you.

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