So, recently I have doing quite alot of reading about memory and learning, and I must say that so far I am baffled at the realities of the world inside our skulls and outside. Research has shown that the difference between a chess grand master and a novice player is in their ability to recall the board setup. If a board is shown to a grand master and a novice, chances are the grand master would be able to recreate 90% to 100% of the board, but the recall rate drops to around 40-60% for a novice on average. So, this might make you believe that the grand masters are super human, but the reality is that they are every bit human, just trained ones.
When a grand master and a novice is shown are board which was created by randomly putting all the pieces together, they recall rate and the novice's became equal. This shows that the grandmasters are able to store a board of pieces as a whole when there is a logical undertone to its structure. This process is called chunking and the novice players are not able to do so as they have not developed the vast library of information the grand masters have unconsciously built from their experiences and knowledge from previous experiences provide abstractions for the masters' brains' to encode the whole board.
So, why does this matter? I mean, is chess even cool ....... ? (YES, it is!)
The point I am trying to make is that when you take your exams and fly through complex mathematical problems without too much though, it is because your brain have been able to create templates of abstractions which can are used by you to solve the problem without much hardship. It is the pattern which makes it easy...... So, the best way to tackle the most complex problems is through practice because as you push the processing to the unconscious mind, your conscious mind is free to learn and process more complex idea; and so we humans grow......
There is no alternative to practice, but they effectiveness of practice can be tweaked greatly and unlike the general (and horrendous) approaches we have been taught all our lives, without deliberate practice, where we focus on errors and learning from them in a gradual incremental fashion, rouge keep pushing until it breaks is just a foolish fatigue prone process with little fruits to offer.
All in all, the theory of relativity did not jump Einstein in his sleep; he built roads through practice..... he spent thinking about the problems!
When a grand master and a novice is shown are board which was created by randomly putting all the pieces together, they recall rate and the novice's became equal. This shows that the grandmasters are able to store a board of pieces as a whole when there is a logical undertone to its structure. This process is called chunking and the novice players are not able to do so as they have not developed the vast library of information the grand masters have unconsciously built from their experiences and knowledge from previous experiences provide abstractions for the masters' brains' to encode the whole board.
So, why does this matter? I mean, is chess even cool ....... ? (YES, it is!)
The point I am trying to make is that when you take your exams and fly through complex mathematical problems without too much though, it is because your brain have been able to create templates of abstractions which can are used by you to solve the problem without much hardship. It is the pattern which makes it easy...... So, the best way to tackle the most complex problems is through practice because as you push the processing to the unconscious mind, your conscious mind is free to learn and process more complex idea; and so we humans grow......
There is no alternative to practice, but they effectiveness of practice can be tweaked greatly and unlike the general (and horrendous) approaches we have been taught all our lives, without deliberate practice, where we focus on errors and learning from them in a gradual incremental fashion, rouge keep pushing until it breaks is just a foolish fatigue prone process with little fruits to offer.
All in all, the theory of relativity did not jump Einstein in his sleep; he built roads through practice..... he spent thinking about the problems!