Page 165 - A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

Just as Olympic athletes don’t build their athletic prowess simply by spending a
few hours jogging on the weekends or lifting a few weights in their spare time,
chess grand masters don’t construct their neural structures through last-minute
cramming. Instead, their knowledge base is gradually built over time and with
plenty of practice that builds their understanding of big-picture context. Practice
like this places the memory traces prominently in the warehouse of long-term
memory, where the neural pattern can be quickly and easily accessed when

needed. 5
Let’s return to chess master Magnus Carlsen—that fast-thinking genius of
speed chess as well as regular chess. Carlsen has an extraordinary grasp of the
patterns of thousands of previously played chess games—he can look at the
arrangement of an endgame on a chess board and instantly tell you which of
more than ten thousand games of past centuries it was drawn from. In other

words, Carlsen has created a vast chunked library of potential solution patterns.
He can quickly riffle through the chunks to see what others have done when
faced with situations similar to what he is facing. 6
Carlsen isn’t unusual in what he is doing, although he does it better than all
but a very few past and present chess players. It is typical for grand masters to
spend at least a decade practicing and studying to learn thousands of memory
7
chunk patterns. These readily available patterns allow them to recognize the key
elements in any game setup much more quickly than amateurs; they develop a
professional eye so they can rapidly intuit the best course of action in any
situation. 8
But wait. Aren’t chess masters and people who can multiply six-digit
numbers in their heads simply exceptionally gifted? Not necessarily. I’m going

to tell it to you straight—sure, intelligence matters. Being smarter often equates
to having a larger working memory. Your hot rod of a memory may be able to
hold nine things instead of four, and you latch onto those things like a bulldog,
which makes it easier to learn math and science.
But guess what? It also makes it more difficult for you to be creative.
How is that?
It’s our old friend and enemy—Einstellung. The idea you already are

holding in mind blocks you from fresh thoughts. A superb working memory can
hold its thoughts so tightly that new thoughts can’t easily peek through. Such
tightly controlled attention could use an occasional whiff of ADHD-like fresh air
—the ability, in other words, to have your attention shift even if you don’t want
it to shift. Your ability to solve complex problems may make you overthink