EEG of my Brain Whilst Playing Chess for Horizon BBC

by simon on Jan. 30, 2010, under Chess, GM Williams, General

Just over a week ago myself and Stuart Conquest took part in a fascinating study for the Horizon TV Science program.

image A certain Dr Amidzic and Dr Sautoy were also involved. Below is an actual EEG (Electroencephalography)  reading of my brain whilst I was involved in a game of chess with Stuart Conquest.

You can read below the conclusions that were taken from the experiment.

The first surprise was that they did actually find something in my head!

Both Dr Amidzic and Dr Sautoy are fascinating characters.

Dr Amidzic played chess for 15 years but he was never able to reach the standard of Grandmaster. He then decided to try and find out the reason for this, hence his research into the human brain.

Sautoy Amidzic

I think that I am correct in saying that he made the hypothesis that Grandmasters brains are innately different to that of a amateur chess players. Hence his study into the topic. You can see his conclusions on me below. (it is amazing how correct he was!)

Dr Sautoy is a professor of mathematics at Oxford University and is the narrator of Horizon.

Anyway, I played a game against Stuart Conquest which took place at the natural history museum. We were both wired up to the EEG whilst the game was taking place. For more information on the EEG the wikipedia link is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroencephalography

Me ‘A lovely piece of headware’

I was told by Dr Amidzic that I had a very big head… As you can see the EEG looked more like a rugby hat then anything else. It will be interesting to see how it looks on TV!

Dr Amidzic then went away and came to the following conclusions about my chess style:

Dear Simon,
Analyses of your brain data are finished and I am ready to share the
results with you. Everything I am going to write now is based on years
of research, but as you know, nobody knows the 100% truth.
Please find enclosed the photo representing your brain activity during
chess game as well as photos from the filming. You can see on the brain
photo that you have not much activity in the frontal and prefrontal
areas, higher amount of activities in the temporal areas, and huge
activity in the occipital areas. According to my analysis, that
indicates that you have deficit in understanding complex chess
strategies, weaknesses in playing complex positional games. This
disadvantage is visible especially on the highest level. On the other
hand, you have huge brain network that gives you great tactical
abilities that compensate lack of strategic understanding. So your
talent is tactical, not strategic. The future of your chess career
depends on how long you will be able on the highest level to avoid
positions where you have weaknesses and keep your games tactical.
I would appreciate if you could tell me what do you think about that
estimation and how accurate it is from your point of view? If you have
any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
All the best,
Ognjen
Dr. Ognjen Amidzic

www.amidzicconsulting.com

Me2

Wow!!! How correct is that!! I have to admit that I was a bit worried at the start of the e-mail as it seemed to be saying that I was actually very thick. homer brain

At least things got a bit better later on! My reply to this email is below:

Dear Ognjen,
The results are very interesting.
I am well known as being a tactical player who prefers to avoid strategic play and long drawn out games. I am basically at home in sharp, messy, complicated positions.
I guess I am one of the most aggressive players in Britain so I would say your results are spot on! Well done!

Best Wishes,

Simon Williams

Sautoy

Anyway I found the whole thing very interesting and I must thank Dr Amidzic for letting me use his photos.

Just imagine how this could influence chess?

For example, if from the age of 6 you new that a player would excel in tactical positions, then you could shape his chess upbringing around that. You could choose the sharpest openings for him and generally suggest that he enters complications.

Stewart and Crew

Stig K
Jan. 31, 2010

Fascinating.

I wonder why Dr. Amidzic is so convinced that mental talent is inborn though. Isn’t it equally likely that special attention to and work on tactics and attacking play has made you the player you are?

Players like the Polgar sisters in chess and Andre Agassi in tennis ended up very “gifted” even though the decisive factor is known to be early exposure to the game and massive training from childhood on in both cases. If any form of mental training leads to permanent changes, those changes can in principle be observed in the brain.

simon
Feb. 1, 2010

The whole topic is very interesting.
I guess like most nature/nurture debates the truth is somewhere in the middle but the conclusions that Dr. Amidzic arrived at are very interesting. He seemed to sum up my supposed style of play very precisely.
I wonder how you would train up other areas of the brain? Would it be more important to train these areas up or would it be a better idea to concentrate on the areas of the brain that are already strong, for me the areas that deals with tactics?
I can still see a lot of uses for this type of research, anyone else got any ideas how it could be used?

simona
Feb. 1, 2010

Pretty accurate. Mine would probably be the exact opposite results! Do we know what he said about Stuart? And who won the game?

Dr. Ognjen Amidzic
Feb. 2, 2010

Pronounced differences in the magnitude and distribution of brain activity point to different mechanisms of brain processing and to differences in the functional brain organization of gifted and average persons. My 10 years long-term studies on chess players suggest that the training process cannot change that differences, which indicates that giftedness is genetically determined and thus can be early assessed and measured.

Regarding the usage of that technology in other areas then chess, it is important to mention that mental talent is one of the key factors that determine the value of a player in sports that require athletes to anticipate their opponents’ actions, such as soccer, volleyball, basketball, tennis, etc. Club managers and professional coaches need an additional and more accurate method for the selection and identification of players with mental talent. Visual observation, the traditional selection method, is a very subjective and inefficient way of identifying mentally talented players, since coaches need a couple of years to reach a conclusion.

david moskovic
Feb. 2, 2010

thats pretty interesting. however im not convinced of conclusions drawn from a sample size of one :) . would be great if they could expand the study to look at more people (eg simon ansell (I assume is simona) who is extreme in the other direction, and perhaps compare to the ECG of weaker players (control group). I wonder if a weaker player who is also a hacker would show similar results to simon w.

Dr. Ognjen Amidzic
Feb. 2, 2010

The first study with many GM, IM, FM and weaker players as a control group started 10 years ago and has been publish in Nature in 2001 (Amidzic et al. 2001. Pattern of focal gamma bursts in chess players. Nature, Vol. 412, 603).

Jim Patzer
Feb. 2, 2010

When is the Horizon programme due to be aired?

Dr. Ognjen Amidzic
Feb. 4, 2010

The broadcast date for the Horizon documentary is Wednesday 17th February.

Magnus
Feb. 4, 2010

Specializing in cognitive neuropsychology, I found this study very fascinating, and the conclusions about your style in relation to location of activity, especially the emphasis on occipita/temporal areas, quite spot on. I was surprised that the parietal lobe, often involved in manipulating visual imagery, wasn’t strongly involved. However, he is saying that your pattern recognition system is very sharp!

I found his conclusion about nature/nurture VERY odd, though. Activation is just a parallell process to what is experienced in the mind. Not “creating it from a fixed set of neurons and their interplay. Very much is becoming apparent about plasticity in the brain, and my disagreement with this study is that it would only be TRULY interesting if you now read up on positional play, exercise extensively and methodically with the sole purpose of becoming as good as you can in positional understanding, and then do a retest with the electrodes hooked up. Observed biology is NOT observed “genes” or observed “potential”.

Tell him to do that!!!

Dr. Ognjen Amidzic
Feb. 4, 2010

Well Magnus, as I wrote in my previous comment, regardless you are training or not, your result will not be changed through the training process. In the long-term study in the past 10 years some test persons tried to do that, but nobody succeed to improve the test results. Even if this sounds odd for you specializing in cognitive neuropsychology, that is the fact. And since you are specialist in neuropsychology, please write your full name so the readers can find you in Internet and learn from your studies, your new knowledge and contribution to the science you have been created during your life, and please explain to us why the measurement results in chess are not changing despise “plasticity in the brain”? Since you are using words like “mind” in you comment, please explain what the “mind” is, but not psychological bla bla, but detailed, the facts, the physics of mind, so that I can create an artificial “mind” in my laboratory. I don’t know what the “mind” is and how “mind” works, but I am ready to learn from you.

Magnus
Feb. 4, 2010

Amidzic. A bit touchy, no? Relax. I thought that people, such as you (having published in “Nature”) were a bit less insecure when confronted. I suggest you start reading on “narcissistic defenses” before reacting to someone posting ideas different from your own. You set out to “prove” how these different aspects of the game are innate, and I think you are very wrong in assuming this based on basic knowledge on how activity in different lobes reflect strategies for problem solving etc. If the chess player you are studying has learned chess in a particular manner, adapted to a certain style of approaching the game, this surely does not mean that you’ve found something “innate”. What you’ve found is proof of what he could already tell you about the way he thinks about the game. Now changing his basic approach to the game would be very difficult, but merely watching crude EEG with “experience/time” as a variable does not tell you ANYTHING about whether what you found is nature or nurture. Show a study where you systematically give different children different chess training from the beginning, focusing on (emphasizing) positional vs. tactical aspects of the game, and THEN maybe you have something interesting to say about the nature/nurture issue. This research is eaten up and swallowed raw when it is methodically very(!) problematic. You have absolutely NO true control over the environmental variables which would satisfy demands of experimental validity, and hence you can say precious little about causes for the activity – only that it’s there.

Now to your question of who I am. Typical technique for the narcissistic “big shot” to silence critics. I do NOT publish studies in your field, and i am much younger than you. Point is: you are inferring big with very little. About the mind…. neverMIND! Cheers.

Dr. Ognjen Amidzic
Feb. 5, 2010

Magnus, as a “specialist in neuropsychology” who prefer to stay anonymous, you should have learned by now that the definition of science (from Latin scientia) is the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment. The goal of science is the creation of new knowledge that will benefit society. That is what I am doing, creating something useful. And you? The definition of criticism is the expression of disapproval of someone or something based on perceived faults or mistakes. Since there is no evidence from the scientific community regarding any perceived faults or mistakes in my work, your comments are not even criticism. Criticism requires a lot of knowledge, and I don’t see any knowledge in your comments. You are using words and phrases that still have no explanation in physics trying to impress non-scientific audience. Please forgive me that I cannot continue that low level non-scientific discussion about science with you any more.

tompaw
Feb. 5, 2010

This certainly is an interesting area for resaerch. But there is something a bit odd about the whole thing. When I first read the letter from Dr Amidzic to Simon Williams I laughed, because it was obviously a joke – I thought. The wording and content was crude and offensive: “you have deficit in understanding complex chess strategies, weaknesses in playing complex positional games.” Sounds like “you are a moron to me”. It also gives me a feeling that the writer does not understand chess. This separation between tactics and strategy is something we teach the beginner, but as he becomes more skilled in the game the separation between the two will be blurred. On the top level (“This disadvantage is visible especially on the highest level.”) there is hardly any separation between tactics and strategy. Is is possible that Dr Amidzic knew beforehand Simon Williams profile as a chess player or was this a blind test?

Magnus
Feb. 5, 2010

Evasive, dr. Amidzic. And your are steering clear of very(!) basic principles for making actual statements about causality, which are childishly “low-level”, to use your degrading phrase. Your comments here are so defensive that it’s almost like you are confronted with your lack of understanding the most elementary principles of science?

Your definition of science is not adding anything to this discussion, and seems like your way of trying to hold on to your own position as the bloated “expert”. Now, you still need to face your FUNDAMENTAL lack of experimental validity NEEDED to make statements about causality. It is so extremely low-level (I love this phrase now), and I can’t understand why you can’t elaborate on HOW you actually see this as being explained by your own research?

It’s been mentioned before:
“Similar gamma-band activity has been observed during examinations of novice and expert air traffic controllers and pilots, Dr. Jantzen added. He cautioned, however, that “one must be careful in attributing causal role to differences in cortical activity It is possible, as the authors are careful to point out, that these differences reflect the impact of experience and not innate ability or strategy.”

I found this VERY much in line with everything I’ve already written. You make causal statements from pure correlations from EEG data.

Your research is in many ways redundant without the application of a more creative design because the mentioned frontal activity in the paragraph above is documented in nearly every study separating activity in novices vs. experts AND in differences between learning phases and decreased prefrontal activity post learning phases.

That this is valid in chess is not news. You’re just another clown who reports what the machine says about electrochemical impulses, and then you write it down. You need to be a lot more creative with your experimental design if you ever want to say something new in this field.

You come off as a small, narcissistic, aggressive and defensive mind, who got his hands on a big expensive machine. This is not nearly enough. You’re lacking creativity in your experimental design, and maybe also in your way of thinking about chess. Creativity and openness to conflicting ideas could help you improve your chess.

“Since there is no evidence from the scientific community regarding any perceived faults or mistakes in my work”

I didn’t say that it was. I’m saying that your conclusion about causality are false. That is backed up by dr. Janzen, by the way. Maybe it is hereditary, but there is no way to tell from your study, so you ARE faced with the same criticism from others in the “scientific community”, you are just not understanding your own results or comments made about them.
Nature did NEVER publish an article where you made these proposterous claims. They published it as a cute 1-page story about neuroscience and chess.

“The goal of science is the creation of new knowledge that will benefit society. That is what I am doing, creating something useful. And you?”

It is not new knowledge, nor is it useful if you apply it based on your false nature/nurture conclusion – it could even be harmful. But go on and fool those people in Brazil. Make those $$$s.

I’ll be sure to send this correspondence to colleagues and the brazilians you are selling this to. You have been embarassingly arrogant and angry from the very first comment. Stop being so sensitive and get down from your high horse. This is a huge field and there are thousands of us.

Magnus
Feb. 5, 2010

By the way: the comment made by Janzen was of course about your study. I take it that your understanding of “difference in experience” readily can be understood as “time playing chess”?

If this is how you understand experience, then you are quite simply too simple minded to be responsible for setting up the research design. Ask one of your colleagues for assistance and supervision. Preferably someone with an introductory course in basic scientific principles.

simon
Feb. 6, 2010

I am not sure that I like the way these posts are going.
My experience of Dr. Ognjen is that he is a very professional and knowledgeable individual who has dedicated his life to searching for the truth.
I will personally not get involved with any of the comments here as far as to say that personal attacks will not be tolerated on gingergm.
Simon Williams

Dr. Ognjen Amidzic
Feb. 6, 2010

Dear Simon,

Thanks for your comment trying to protect me from further personal attacks on your website. These personal attacks and disagreement with my research is not new for me. From my experience, as soon as you are telling to the bright audience of average people that gifted persons like Simon Williams are born exceptional and not just made through training only, the average audience gets very emotional and aggressive. They believe and want to believe that Simon Williams and other gifted people are in fact just ordinary average people and nothing else but a product of hard work, and everybody from that average audience could make the same achievement only if they want to spend many years of training. That is absolutely wrong. Average audience want to believe that anybody could become new Mozart, Tesla, Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Mikhail Tal or Simon Williams just through hard work. This is absurd and simply not truth. According to my research in that area, Simon Williams is born and from Nature or God gifted person with exceptional abilities, exceptional brain and genes. His hard work studding chess is required in order to grow, but his giftedness is born, it is very rare, and I admire that giftedness.

Through my research I see that people are not born with equal abilities and the nature or God didn’t give to all people the equal physical and mental qualities. But what is equal in nature? Nothing. Equality is simply not natural. I understand that it is much easier to disagree with my research, to attack and to try to insult me then to deal with that for many average people very painful low of nature. I am not responsible and guilty for the mediocrity in the world, and also not responsible that there are clear mental differences between average and gifted persons. I am just pointing to these mental differences between them.

But if the bright average audience wants to show me that my research and my point of view are wrong, then they have to prove it with facts and not just with disagreement and/or insulting. The best way is to open for example an “Institution For Creation Of Gifted People and Genius”, where all parents could bring their children in order to make them genius in any area of human occupation, where the new Mozart, Tesla, Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Mikhail Tal or Simon Williams will be created from average people. After that I will publicly admit that I was wrong.

Regards,
Dr. Ognjen Amidzic

Stig K
Feb. 8, 2010

While Magnus’ tone here has been rude and confrontational, his raised some interesting points.

I looked up the papers published in Nature (2001) and Journal of Psychophysiology (2006). They seem rather cautious (as honest scientific research should be); claiming merely that the EEG research supports and extends the standard chunking theories of expert memory: Professional players access long-term memory stored in the neocortex, while the amateurs are busy encoding new information in the temporal lobe (hippocampus maybe).

Many in the expertise research tradition have struggled to find evidence of innate differences apart from serious neurological disorders. K. Anders Ericsson has even claimed that height and body size are the only known genetically determined limitations on skilled performance (in sports where those physical attributes are relevant). On the other hand:

“We reject an important role for innate ability. It is quite plausible, however, that heritable individual differences might influence processes related to motivation and the original enjoyment of the activities in the domain[...]” (Ericsson, K.A., R.T. Krampe & C. Tesch-Römer (1993). Psychol. Rev. 100, p.399).

By the way, I’m not so sure that this “no innate abilities, only motivation and hard work” is the standard belief of an average audience. The view of Einsten, Mozart, Da Vinci, Capablanca etc. etc. as innately gifted are very popular and intuitively appealing. But it has been hard to prove until now, according to Ericsson.

The final paragraph of Amidzic, Riehle & Elbert (2006) points forward to the arguments Dr. Amidzic presents here:

“It is possible that the chunks, their creation, and the ability of the brain to store and execute chunks in the neocortex (creation and establishment of skills) are what determines giftedness for a particular task and that they are the key factor in the creation of expert memory, and not just that of chess players.” (p.257)

If there is now new evidence that can clarify to what extent expert/amateur memory differences are innate or built up by training, that will be very interesting to hear about. I certainly hope I will be able to see the Horizons show at some point even here in Norway!

Alexander
Feb. 12, 2010

I got interested in this film and searched it at the official BBC site broadcast list, but I havent’t found it yet. Is there any mentioning or reference to this film at official BBC site?

simona
Feb. 12, 2010

Alexander, I found this: What Makes a Genius?

Simon W probably will have more details.

Alexander
Feb. 14, 2010

Thank you, Simona!

admin
Feb. 19, 2010

The BBC iPlayer link for the programme is:
Horizon – What Makes a Genius?

Not sure how long it’s available and it might only be so in the UK, but it’s there.

ericg
Feb. 21, 2010

I’m pleased to be made aware of Dr Amidzic’s research through this blog but I’m left with more questions than answers. I’m a statistician (and therefore qualified to comment on his study designs and data analysis although I haven’t read his papers) but will approach this primarily from the perspective of a mature adult player currently around 2000-2100 Elo strength and keen to improve (this is a chess blog after all!). My main question would be: how accurate a prediction of peak chess playing strengths can he make from his brain scans of chess players? (I suspect the answer is ‘not very accurate’ as presumably psychological factors such as motivation to train, self-confidence during a game and so on also need to be taken into account?) I imagine this question would be of even more interest to a player of Simon Williams’s standard. The financial implications for grandmasters of that standard would be quite considerable if they knew from their brain scan that they had the potential to increase their rating by 100 points or more.

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