Interesting study on how Japanese chess Shogi players use brain more efficiently

Chess blog for latest chess news and chess trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2011


Hi everyone,


We enjoyed reading this study. It talks about how players of Japanese chess - shogi - use their brains more efficiently. We believe the same would apply to regular chess players as well. It talks of how experience and training can help master-level players shift some problem-solving stuff to their intuitive area and use their 'free cortext area' to focus on higher strategy and planning. Quite like linking up two hard discs to your laptop - we would say. Go on read the article. 

Primates, particularly humans, are set apart from other vertebrates by more than a huge expansion of the cerebral cortex, the region of the brain used for thinking. The connection and coordination of the cerebral cortex with other, older parts of the brain also play a significant role, according to findings published recently in Science by a research team from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute (BSI) in Wako, Japan.

The researchers, led by Keiji Tanaka, found that professional players of the Japanese chess-like game of shogi can use part of brain associated with intuitive or habitual behaviors to establish a best next-move in a way that distinguishes them from amateurs. One result of experience and training seems to be the ability to shunt some immediate neural tasks from the cerebral cortex to the more intuitive basal ganglia, leaving the cortex free for planning higher-level strategy.

“Our findings may be regarded as showing that in amateur players problem-solving occurs mostly in the newly developed brain structure, but in professionals an important part of the process goes to the old brain structure,” Tanaka says. “This shift makes the process quick and unconscious.”

The work may have significant ramifications for training, particularly in understanding what constitutes an intuitive part of a job as opposed to the intellectual or educative part. It is also relevant to the development of computer expert systems. “The elucidation of such brain mechanisms may hint at a way to train engineers efficiently to become experts,” Tanaka explains. “Trouble shooting of computer networks, for instance, is dependent on intuitive insights of experienced engineers. They often focus on specific points of the network, but cannot explain why they do so.”

Using board games to understand the mind

Investigating mechanisms of higher brain functions of decision making has been one of the prime interests of Tanaka’s laboratory at BSI. An important question in this field, which has long been a subject of inquiry, is how experts differ from the rest of us.

Although psychologists have been studying the players of such games for more than a century, there has been almost no work on the underlying neural mechanisms. Consequently, differences in neural activity between the brains of amateur and expert players remain poorly understood. Tanaka and his team designed their study, in part, to provide much-needed data on brain function.

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