⚡ You Don't See Everything You See (Quick Lesson)

0:00Hi, it's Aiden. We're shaking up the order of things a little bit this week. And probably for the next few weeks, Thursdays, I normally put out a walkthrough episode. Those things take a while. They take a lot of thought, a lot of energy, a lot of effort. And I'm normally very, very happy to do all of that. But right now we are sprinting to get the new version of the don't move until you see it website up and running. I absolutely cannot wait for this. It's going to be so good. We've been working really hard for months now. I'm really proud of the work we've been doing. The design is looking gorgeous. The feature set is just so much beyond what the current site can do. We're totally stoked on it. But it's also meaning I'm spending sort of 12 to 60 hours staring at my computer screen, looking at code at the moment. And these walkthrough episodes, I thought about trying to smash them out for this little period.

1:00But they just, they just wouldn't be very good. If I really did that, I would be doing you a disservice. And for something that's a 45 minute episode sometimes, that would be, yeah, this is not really what I want to do. So what we're going to do for the next few weeks is release some more quick lessons. It's a little bit easier for me to put into a smaller recording chunk to keep the focus in a big way on the site. But also still with plenty of quality for you all listening, I definitely don't want to let you down through this period while I am, yeah, sprinting as it were. So that's what we're going to do probably sort of three to five weeks without a walkthrough. And then we'll get back into them once things settle down a little bit. For today, I want to keep things pretty high level in this quick lesson. I just want to talk about a particular point of tension that's a, there's a lot of holes

2:03that we fall into in our chess game, just really come down to this one idea. And it makes it difficult for us to recognize what's wrong sometimes, especially we don't understand the science behind it or haven't kind of talked about things like working memory up to this point, it's really easy to blame ourselves for these sorts of things. And it's this one sort of central idea that I think about all the time with the work I'm doing is that we don't see everything that we see. So our eyes when we're looking at a chessboard can physically see everything. And because they can physically see everything, we think we should be noticing everything, paying attention to everything. But it's not really the case. We are eyes are taking in all of this information, like a light is hitting the retinas with all of this information, but our brain isn't taking it all in. Our brain is being very selective about what we're actually engaging with.

3:05There's the same way we deal with general life as we're wandering around as this filtering process, helping us try to identify what's important, what's not important. Because if our brain tried to take it in, all the ones taking it in the whole wide world, all at once, we'd probably just explode. This happens all the time in chess. So what our eyes are seeing is just raw data. There is this interpretation layer that our brain has as we're taking that information in and that interpretation layer is prone to all sorts of weird little mistakes. It's in a large part based on our working memory capacity. What are we noticing about it? But also patterns we're familiar with. If a sort of a pattern on the position is close to something we know, there's a good chance our brain will just replace it with the thing that we know better. If our working memory is under pressure, we'll put more attention on a particular part

4:05that seems important and we'll put much less on everything else. They'll become practically invisible. Technically our eyes can see that section of the board, but our brain can't. So whatever you're doing with the chess work, with the conceptualization training or kind of any other part, just try to be aware of this interaction, especially if you beat yourself up for certain kinds of mistakes. Like chess makes us think that we should be able to see everything in a position all the time because it's all there right in front of us. But yeah, even though our eyes technically can, our brains can't. And that tension is where a lot of mistakes, a lot of strange glitches, a lot of odd occurrences come into play. That's where they live. If we don't recognize that those two things are different, what our eyes can see and what our brain can see. If we don't recognize those two things are different, then we're very likely to misdiagnose the mistakes we're making and either beat ourselves up or pour ourselves into concrete

5:08training that might not actually resolve the problem, just like it is the bad data. It's based on a bad assumption about what's happening. So yeah, a bit of a high level thing there, perhaps not the most practical thing in the world, but something worth thinking about as you're looking at mistakes or looking at training that you're looking at doing is really being aware of this separation. Not just thinking what's happening in the position, also thinking what I'm eye-seeing about the position and realizing those two things are different. Great. Nice quick one. Today, as said, we'll come back with the walkthrough episodes once the new website is out. I might also use this Thursday episode to give you an update on some of that because I'm really excited about it. The membership is really excited about it and there's going to be some great perks for podcast listeners coming across as well when we sort of get that stuff going. So you're really excited about all of that. And if you have any ideas, actually, or as a podcast listener, whether you're a member

6:10or not on the site, if there is something that you wish this podcast had or like a link in the show notes that could take you somewhere or something like that that would really add to your experience of this podcast, let me know. Send me an email at and don't move until you see dot it. I've building this website from scratch myself. It's been an incredible learning experience and it's been so exciting. I think the product is going to be really good at the end of it and it really gives me the opportunity to do the sorts of things that I really wish more things could do. So if there is an idea that you have about how this podcast could be made better by something that my website can do as well, then yeah, please reach out because I've got flexibility. I might actually be able to do it and I'm pretty, pretty excited about that. That's all from me today. Here's to the journey.