Intelligence — a word that is the hall mark of our evolution as a species. Humanity has been able to achieve everything from cooking breakfast to sending rovers to Mars due to its collective intelligence. Have you ever wondered — what makes us think & how the process of thinking & reasoning evolves in the human brain? To think that a game of kings could unlock some wonderful mysteries about the genesis of ideas & thought could almost sound presumptuous & preposterous at the same time.

The Opening

The basic building blocks of the brain’s hardware are its neurons. These neurons are interconnected like a giant internet that helps the brain’s neural pathways to carry inputs from the body’s various sensory organs and helps the brain process the output.

Any processing engine requires software to run and the brain’s software is built using concepts. These concepts are created, combined, parsed, recombined and modified using the brain’s language — logic & reason. While the brain’s hardware is one of the greatest mysteries of the world, the software is something we have understood better.

Just like with the technological revolution the world has seen, the software & hardware form a virtuous cycle of growth & innovation. Better software leads to better hardware, which in turn leads to better software in turn. Chess impacts the very heart of this software development process happens in the human brain.

The Middle Game

The core of intelligence is the brain’s ability to build on concepts from the simple to the most complex through the process of integrating information in a non-contradictory system due to the brain’s ability to understand cause & effect, find patterns among concepts, grasp the fundamental concepts of time and space & the constraints therein and its ability to realize & differentiate good from bad. It is these abstract fundamental abilities of the human brain that we call the sixth sense.

Once we have defined intelligence, our next endeavor & quest is to measure, find ways to improve, analyze strengths & deficiencies and control our intelligence intelligently.

The oldest measure of intelligence is the famous IQ, which heavily relied on measuring the logical & verbal abilities of a child. The theory of multiple intelligence was put forth to rectify some of the shortcomings of the IQ theory. However, I suggest another way of visualizing intelligence by abstracting it one level above the multiple intelligence theory.

As mentioned earlier, intelligence is like the software that processes new data and information. There are two types of software — one, which is created for a particular type of information and the other, which is created independent of the data input. The former is what we call crystallized intelligence and the latter is called fluid intelligence. Here is where the chess plays a pivotal role.

Fluid intelligence is built on fundamental thinking patterns such as abstraction, pattern recognition, extrapolation, causation & correlation. Chess helps build each one of these and once developed, one can’t help but apply it across a variety of subjects.

Directions in a new city — Figuring out that streets run east-west and boulevards run north-south in a new city you’ve never been to and estimating the time required to go from point A to point B within 90% accuracy based on how long it takes to walk one block and extrapolating is fluid intelligence. Knowing a short cut from point A to point B that cuts the traffic in half is crystallized intelligence.

This is just a simple example of situations we face in our everyday lives, where fluid intelligence can make a huge difference. Today’s world, in particular, underlines the need for fluid intelligence more than ever. The reason for this is the every changing landscape of information and data.

Information that was once relevant turns obsolete at a faster pace. The average shelf life for information has come down drastically making the quest for crystallized intelligence so much harder. The 21st century is going to continue to be one where mankind will spend most of its time & energies in knowledge acquisition and categorization. A highly evolved fluid intelligence in this milieu will be a certain game changer.

The Endgame

The reason chess is such an effective tool to build fluid intelligence in children is because it is a game and it is visual. We have begun to understand the human psyche better where gamification is wonderfully effective means of learning and visual information is processed and acquired faster and at a quicker pace compared to other type of data.

Chess is all about patterns — from the basic patterns of alternating colors to recognizing opening patterns. Rooks move vertically & horizontally. Bishops move diagonally. King moves in all directions. This nature of chess allows for building two important skills — abstraction & chunking.

Chess is also a very important means to simulate the impact of decisions. Once a child is able to understand what is good & bad — gaining & losing pieces, it doesn’t take long to feel the impact of good & bad decisions thus learning the most important skill — cause & effect.

In chess, you get only one move, 64 square and 16 pieces — imposing a strong sense of time & space constraints, which exists even at a global scale. Chess inculcates the sense of conserving both time & space.

At a higher level, most time in chess is spent introspecting and analyzing one’s games and this leads one the most important skill required for fluid intelligence — meta thinking — the ability to think about your thoughts.

And finally, the most important thing chess builds in a child is the journey itself the process of concept-building from learning the simplest of knowledge about files, ranks & how the pieces move to creating complex strategies — something that is required across all forms of intelligence.

Thus, I believe chess should be in the arsenal of every child in this century. The quest is not to make everyone into competitive chess master but to make everyone a critical thinker with common sense. It would do the world a world of good. Don’t you think?