八月英文原版书阅读计划  图/Eric

Part 1: Words and Expressions

stumble

Twenty-six boards, 832 individual pieces, and 1,664 individual squares to keep track of—all without taking notes or having any sort of memory aid—and yet Alekhine never stumbled.

Verb

1. to hit your foot on something when you are walking or running so that you fall or almost fall

2. to walk in an awkward way 

3. to speak or act in an awkward way

E.g. : He stumbled drunkenly across the room.

Noun

an act or instance of stumbling 

E.g. : Bones are so brittle that a minor stumble can result in a serious break.

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zero in

the particular mental processes that set chess masters apart from chess novices and make possible their incredible ability to analyze chess positions and zero in on the best moves.

Verb:

1. to concentrate firepower on the exact range of 

2. to bring to bear on the exact range of a target 

3. to close in on or focus attention on an objective 

E.g.: Investigators are zeroing in on a suspect.

Part 2: My Thoughts

A mental representation is a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about.

如何理解这个 mental representation?

表面意思上来看就是精神体现，更深入的解释的话我觉得就是事物在大脑中的体现、表征。我查阅了维基百科之后他的翻译是心智表征或者认知表征。人们总是在说心想着一件事情，而事实上，思考的是大脑而非心脏，里面有点唯心主义的意思。所以我比较倾向于使用认知表征作为它的中文翻译。

文章通过国际象棋大师和新手之间下盲棋的对比，向我们引出了“认知表征”这个概念。在记忆具体棋子位置这方面，大师们并不占优。而实际盲棋对局中，他们对大局观的把握会比新手高出一个等级：通过棋谱和实战的训练，他们在大脑中已经形成了一个思维的大树，不同的对局就是一个不同的分支。在盲棋对局中，他需要调用已经形成的部分树枝，所以他是在应用之前的长期记忆，而非短期记忆。

这里我就想到了之前的“Alpha Go”，围棋的所有可能性用目前的服务器是无法穷举的，所以这就是谷歌母公司“Alphabet”的厉害之处，利用机器学习极大地减少无胜算的分支，也就是说它利用“剪枝”这个技术，实现了每一步的最优解。而在国际象棋领域，应用现有的计算机技术已经可以实现所有可能走法的穷举，所以每一盘棋它都是有一个参考树枝的，你只需要沿着一条特定的树枝走下去，最后就能实现最后的胜利或者平局。

Part 3: Summary

Blindfold chess offers one of the most dramatic examples of what is possible to accomplish with purposeful practice. And learning a bit about blindfold chess can give us a clear idea of the sorts of neurological changes that arise from such practice.

They worked to become chess masters, and they found themselves, with little or no additional effort, able to play blindfolded.

The experienced players’ advantage had disappeared.

Similarly, chess masters don’t develop some incredible memory for where individual pieces sit on a board. Instead, their memory is very context-dependent: it is only for patterns of the sort that would appear in a normal game.

First, the mental representations are more than just ways of encoding positions.

In short, while the mental representations give masters a view of the forest that novices lack, they also allow masters to zero in on the trees when necessary.

A mental representation is a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about.

A key fact about such mental representations is that they are very “domain specific,” that is, they apply only to the skill for which they were developed.

The main thing that sets experts apart from the rest of us is that their years of practice have changed the neural circuitry in their brains to produce highly specialized mental representations, which in turn make possible the incredible memory, pattern recognition, problem solving, and other sorts of advanced abilities needed to excel in their particular specialties.

In other words, experts see the forest when everyone else sees only trees.

The key benefit of mental representations lies in how they help us deal with information: understanding and interpreting it, holding it in memory, organizing it, analyzing it, and making decisions with it.