The Chess Stress Response

Another aspect of chess as a sport is the intense psychological and physiological exertion involved in a competitive chess game, and the crisis after the game. What sports science calls the "stress response process" is at least as powerful in chess as it is in more physical sports. When I say exertion, I am not referring only to the mental gymnastics of moving the pieces in our minds, but also the huge nervous tension that fills you before and during the game, tension that rises and falls wit...

 Teaching as Natural Selection

Teaching is commonly associated with instruction, yet in evolution, immunology, and neuroscience, instructional theories are largely defunct. We propose a co-immunity theory of teaching, where attempts by a teacher to alter student neuronal structure to accommodate cultural ideas and practices is sort of a reverse to the function of the immune system, which exists to preserve the physical self, while teaching episodes are designed to alter the mental self. This is a theory of teaching that ...

 Discard Bad Ideas

the hard but just rule is that if the ideas don't work, you must throw them away. Don't waste neurons on what doesn't work. Devote those neurons to new ideas that better explain the data. The British physicist Michael Faraday warned of the powerful temptation to seek for such evidence and appearances as are in the favour of our desires, and to disregard those which oppose them . . . We receive as friendly that which agrees with [us], we resist with dislike that which opposes us; whereas the...