How powerful is your mind?

I received an email from my good friend Hun Pin from Singapore. I enjoyed reading and quickly asked for his permission to post it.

By the way, Happy birthday Hun Pin! Wishing you a life in which you give yourself the gift of patience and the faith in achieving worthy rewards!

How powerful is your mind? - by Ooi Hun Pin

Exactly how powerful is the mind? I'm writing an article in response to a question for which I don't have an answer. BUT, I can tell you an inspiring story that you will never hear, unless you are a true chess enthusiast.

Miguel Najdorf was a Jew of Polish nationality. He was playing in a chess tournament in Argentina when World War 2 started. Due to the war, he decided to stay on in Argentina. Because of the war, he lost contact with his family. If you remember, the Jews were very badly prosecuted by Nazi Germans then, and Najdorf was concerned and wanted to find his family after the war.

But how? He decided to do a publicity stunt such that the world has never seen, and thus, would be reported in the newspapers, and hopefully, would give his family news of where he was. What did he do that the whole world would be interested to notice?

He played chess. Not any kind of chess but a simultaneous chess exhibition, i.e. he would play with many people at one time. This by itself is nothing special, and even in Penang Free School, I would give such chess exhibition matches for the PFS Chess Club by playing with 20 to 25 players at one time. This gives the less experienced players a chance to play with me, and except for the top 3 players in PFS, the rest of the chess enthusiasts would usually join in.

Najdorf decided to play against 45 adult players. BUT, he needed a much more sexy story if he was going to get a huge publicity. So, he decided to play all the 45 players at the same time, BLINDFOLDED. This means that Najdorf was not allowed to see the board and pieces, but his opponents, all 45 of them, can see properly.

In my young days, I also play blindfold chess with my fellow junior state player (anyone below that standard would be lost as to where his pieces are in less than 10 moves. It takes my full concentration to play a game of more than 25 moves, but it can be done, with some strong willpower of the mind. It's not only about remembering where your pieces are. You also have to calculate a few moves deep on where each of the pieces should be. That's a real test of your brainpower.

And here he was. Najdorf was going for his publicity stunt blindfolded, playing 45 games at the same time, remembering the positions of the 1,280 chess pieces at play. Also, it is usual that the moment your opponent moves, you would move in less than 10 seconds, so as not to keep everyone waiting too long. The chess exhibition lasted almost 24 hours. It was so long that a number of players gave up, and had to be replaced by other players who continued to play the position. All this while, Najdorf stayed awake and played till the last game was decided. He scored 39 wins, 4 draws and only 2 losses!

This is the power of the mind and will power to win of a strong Chess Grandmaster.

In a scientific test, it was found that the memory of the strong chess player was no different than that of a normal person. Actually, there were two tests. The first was that a group of strong chess players and another group of weak chess players, were shown, and asked to remember, as many of the board positions shown. It was found that the strong chess players could remember significantly more, and thus, the conclusion then was that the strong chess players had better memory.

But another scientific experiment was conducted about 10 years later, and the first scientific experiment was repeated with similar results. The 2nd Experiment was conducted whereby, the chess pieces were not put in accordance with the rules of a chess game, i.e. they were put at random. It was found in the 2nd Experiment that there was no significant difference in memory performance between the strong chess players and the weaker ones.

This is a landmark discovery in science. It means, in general, that your mind and mine, are practically similar in memory power. I guess both must be 2 GB RAM today. Whether DDR RAM or SD RAM, I'm not sure. The point is, we are both given the same mental faculties as far as memory are concerned. The difference lies in how we think and process information, and how we link them / associate them from one piece to the next. When we have a causal link, we remember better than if we have a random reference on the information / data.

So, in conclusion, your mind is powerful enough. All you need to do is to learn how to use it correctly, i.e. check your user manual on page 403, or alternatively, send an email to Microsoft Help Desk. :-P

Some of you will be happy with this information. Wow, I have a mind equal to that of Ooi's and GM Miguel Najdorf, at least from a RAM Memory perspective, and not CPU, which is speed of processing. Another will feel very upset. You mean after all the folic acid my mother took when she was pregnant with me, I'm no different from that idiot??? Hahahahahaha.

Warning - Please note that you should not attempt to play blindfold chess on a simultaneous exhibition basis. This is because some of the prominent chess players who have done this in the last 100 years have ended up mad in their old age. Whether this is due to chess, no one knows. But, please be warned that at one time, Blindfolded Simultaneous Chess Exhibitions were banned, and even today, you don't see a chess genius like Garry Kasparov trying a stunt like this. Playing a blindfold game like I did, on a one on one basis, should be fine, as it is only slightly more taxing on the mind than deeply analyzing complicated positions at a tournament without moving the pieces.

As for giving normal simultaneous chess exhibitions, the challenge is not whether your mind can take it, but whether people respect your standard of play enough to want to be a participant. It would be pretty embarrassing to offer to play such an exhibition, and no one turns up for the challenge! :-[