I have been busy lately, putting in fewer hours of studying chess and even less time into writing posts. Anyway, what better way to restart regular tactics training by blogging about some new scientific results on the way repetitive learning translates into brain chemistry? Alison Barth and coworkers from Carnegie Mellon University and the Max Planck Institute discovered a new mechanism for long-term learning. Ever since Michael de la Maza wrote about the circles (see here and here [pdf files]), the benefits of solving a large number of chess problems repetitively has been discussed all over the chess blogosphere. Apparently, there has been a contradiction between experience telling us that repetition is good for long-term learning and brain research: previous research showed that repetitive stimulation might actually reverse early gains in the connection strength between neurons. The research of Alison Barth et al. proposes a new mechanism to solve this paradox.

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written by likesforests, January 07, 2008

Sweet. So practice still makes perfect.

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written by Sciurus, January 08, 2008

You mean there is still hope for me? Really? I got to get back to the tactics problems...

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