By Sarah Kim, Winter 2023.
Two sides, sixty-four squares, and one simple objective: capture your opponent’s king while protecting your own. Of course, chess is rarely that simple. At the professional level, every move is predicated by thousands of hours of practice and review. In fact, it has a long-standing history as an abstract strategy game requiring heavy tactical mastery and quick decision making. However, over the past two decades, chess has steadily been on the rise as both a competitive sport and a recreational brain game. While most great chess players learn the rules of the game at a young age, many well-established professional chess players don’t reach the peak of their careers until they are much older. For example, although renowned Indian chess player Viswanathan Anand earned his Grandmaster title at 19, he didn’t win his first World Championship until the age of 31.
Chess has long been an activity of interest that may improve one’s cognitive function. Cognitive decline, which can occur for unclear clinical reasons, often involves symptoms such as memory loss, attention deficits, and impaired speech and reasoning. Although cognitive decline is not a condition in itself, it is a symptom linked to neurodegenerative disorders such as dementia that disproportionately affect the elderly population. These conditions involve very sharp declines in cognitive function for unclear clinical reasons. The prevalence of cognitive brain decline has alarmed not only medical professionals, but the general public as well. Vitamin supplements, Mediterranean diets, and other trends have come and gone in an attempt to preserve one’s brain health. In recent years, however, chess has quickly emerged as a potential solution to slow the onset of cognitive brain decline.
As the prevalence of dementia rises around the world, the urgency to find a solution has resulted in an exponential increase in research. An article published in 2019 by Lillo-Crespo et al. explored the efficacy of chess as a protective activity against dementia progression, which is a classification for a number of conditions involving cognitive dysfunction and deterioration. They found that while little can be definitively said about chess’s benefits for those who have already been diagnosed with dementia, it might be beneficial to those who may be at risk but have not developed the condition yet. Challenging mental activity from playing chess “produces and strengthens synaptic connections and stimulates neurogenesis” [3]. These strengthened synaptic connections may then generate changes in the brain that could slow the onset of dementia. Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, has been linked to the abnormal buildup of beta-amyloid plaque between neurons in the brain. Although it is unclear exactly when this buildup commences or when it becomes clinically significant for the onset of Alzheimer’s disease symptoms, [amyloid] some studies propose that cognitively stimulating activities may reduce the amyloid buildup in the brain [4]. For this reason, it may be possible to slow the onset of Alzheimer’s disease with chess.
However, nearly all previous literature establishes that most leisure activities (including chess, but also dancing, reading, or crafting) seem to reduce the likelihood of developing dementia for individuals over the age of 75 [5]. A research paper published in 2003 by Dowd et al. documenting the usefulness of chess in Alzheimer’s disease prevention conclude that chess may be helpful since it has been proved that chess is a skill-based game that doesn’t depend on general intelligence [6]. Even though these publications, as well as many others, suggest the effectiveness of chess as a preventative method for dementia, its true protective ability remains unproven.
While it is still unconfirmed if chess can actually prevent these clinical conditions, there are visible benefits that frequent playing do confer. In timed chess variants, such as rapid (each player is given ten minutes to win) and bullet (three minutes to win), players may lose either by being checkmated or by running out of time. Experienced timed-chess players are able to maintain composure and gauge extremely complicated decisions with speed and efficiency. One influential study on the decision-making process of chess players is de Groot’s (1946) study, which suggested that pattern recognition was the key determinant of expertise rather than search. Pattern recognition relies on both memory and visualization, two cognitive functions that are impaired in dementia patients. A paper published in 2011 by Connors et. al sought to replicate that research by empirically testing the rate of pattern recognition of chess players of varying expertise levels [7]. Connors’ findings indicated that the Grandmasters and International Masters (players of professional caliber) examined could pattern-search more quickly than Experts and Class A players, and that both groups today search substantially faster than players in previous studies. The findings, however, support de Groot’s overall conclusions and are consistent with predictions made by pattern recognition models. If those at risk for dementia can exercise their decision-making abilities by playing chess, the repetitive activation of these neural connections associated with decision-making from chess may serve as a way to preserve their cognitive health
Some may question whether or not it is even possible to deliberate consciously during time controls, especially in one minute bullet games. However, a study published in 2019 compared the brain electrical activity of chess players in different time pressure situations and found different activity patterns between ten-minute rapid games and one-minute bullet games [8]. The time constraints of a one-minute bullet game present an appropriate environment to isolate memory chunks and rely on a player’s automatic responses, while a rapid game might allow enough time for players to consciously deliberate and access information from their long-term memory. Interestingly, the right hemisphere is more activated in chess games, which is likely caused by visuospatial processing. These brain pattern characterizations could be useful for applying chess training in delaying the onset of dementia.
Across the world, the increased availability of advanced medical treatment and technology has triggered a monumental shift in epidemiology; the leading causes of death in developing countries are transitioning from communicable to non-communicable conditions [1]. Infectious diseases like measles or tuberculosis can be easily vaccinated for, and effective, clinically-approved treatment regimens have been already constructed for many noncommunicable diseases such as cancer or diabetes. However, there remains widespread concern over conditions, like dementia, that are so complex that very few treatments have proven to be effective.
[2] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01855/fullSelkoe D.J., Hardy J. The amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer’s disease at 25 years. EMBO Mol. Med. 2016;8:595–608. doi: 10.15252/emmm.201606210.
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[6] Dowd S.B., Davidhizar R. Can mental and physical activities such as chess and gardening help in the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer’s. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8964333
[7] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01196.x
[10] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17408989.2021.1990245