Chess is a strategic game that originated in India around the 6th century and it’s become one of the most widely played games in the world. For decades researchers have been trying to figure out the thought processing and data analytic schemes of chess masters in order to understand what makes their problem-solving skills quite literally “world class.” Chess masters’ problem-solving expertise involves an assortment of advanced cognitive skills including strategic thinking, spatial orientation, self-regulation of excitement and stress, abstract reasoning, situational awareness, and superb memory recall. Sound familiar? It should, because those are all the mental tools it takes to be a proficient, safe, “world-class” pilot. Understanding the elements of chess proficiency can help us perfect all different kinds of expertise-related pilot decision-making skills. Let’s take a deeper dive into this unique thinking process and see what we can take away from chess masters to help us be “world-class” pilots and make consistently safe and reliable decisions in the cockpit.
The cognitive skill of master chess players that sets these guys apart from novices is their ability to form meaningful patterns and spatial imagery that they use for decision making. What we can learn as pilots is how they integrate all that data on the chess board to generate superior pattern recognition. At the heart of chess masters’ world class information management is actually what they don’t do—they don’t look at individual pieces—they look at the big picture of the entire chess board as a unified configuration. Neuroscientists call this “information chunking.” It’s a way to store data in big hunks that significantly enhances working memory by allowing for more storage space in active memory centers and faster, more accurate recall. The brain’s equivalent of a computer’s RAM (random access memory) is our “short-term memory” that’s stored right up front in our forehead, a place called the “prefrontal cortex.” There is also some short-term memory processing in the hippocampus, which we talked about last month. The problem for us mere mortals is that we can only hold about 5-7 pieces of information in our cerebral RAM and it only hangs around for a few seconds.
Modern super computer RAM chips like the Fugaku can store an incomprehensible 4.8 petabytes of data (4,800,000 gigabytes), enough to hold around 2.4 trillion pages of printed text or 64 years of high-definition video content, and call it up at instantly in any order. That totally dwarfs our brain’s piddly 5-7 pieces of data. We can flatten the playing field a little by “chunking information” like chess guys; those 5-7 items don’t have to be individual bits of facts—they can be converted into big “chunks” that are much more data rich and still readily available for decision making. That’s one of the main ingredients of master chess expertise that allows them to process so much more information simultaneously—to perceive the “30,000-foot” picture of all the pieces on the board in their heads.
This is a really advanced form of perception and is a complex cognitive process that Garry Kasparov, acknowledged to be the world’s top chess master, talked about when describing his own thinking during a chess match. “I appreciate patterns immediately. The difference between weak players and top world champions is the number of patterns he can recognize.” That describes “information chunking” perfectly; instead of remembering each piece individually, good players recall info chunks that represent multiple pieces, their positions on the board, and their relationships. This reduces cognitive load and speeds up decision-making, which makes their judgement process very efficient and streamlined. Experienced players can store thousands of info bits in a few chunks in their short-term memory, and it’s a fascinating process found in only the most advanced problem solvers.
A perfect way to use information chunking is your pre-flight weather brief. Think of the weather patterns on your route as one big chess board. Just like the masters, you can analyze and predict the movement of all the pieces on the weather board. Follow flow patterns of the wind like little pawns, think in 3-D, and imagine the altitudes for the most favorable flight conditions like knights that can jump over the other pieces so you can find tailwinds and avoid ice. Plan your outs like a chess master; pick an alternate well within your fuel range and well away from weather like “castling” your king, the only time the king can move more than one space. Then store those big chunks of data and play them back in your head as your mission progresses to assure the safest flight through the best weather. This kind of thinking is not that much of stretch; we use info chunking every day without thinking about it. Frequent phone numbers are stored in our cerebral contact list in chunks. We don’t remember a phone number as 1234567890; the numbers are chunked, broken into easily remembered data clumps, 123-456-7890. The same with your social security number, 987654321, which you recall in three chunks, 987-65-4321. That’s chunking: the process of reorganizing individual pieces of information into larger, meaningful units to overcome the bottleneck of working memory. This allows the brain to process and recall information more efficiently, reducing cognitive load and leveraging its natural tendency to organize data, and the more information you can store in chunks the more info you can hold onto and recall and the safer your decisions in the air will be.
There’re all kinds of memory aids out there to help chunk information. One thing you can do is remember the number of items on the check list, or shopping list for that matter. Sometimes I go to the hardware store to get some stuff for a home project and I don’t try to remember all the things I need, but if I remember the number of things, then I can be sure to get everything I need by being sure I have the right number of things. Another chunking thing I use that got me through med school and 3 sets of surgical boards is it to make myself a pneumonic—a short sentence with the first letter of each memory item making up the words to the sentence. Ask any med student the 12 cranial nerve branches and they will run a 12-word pneumonic sentence chunk through their head and rattle them off; same for the 5 branches of the facial nerves. Even after all these years I can still remember them by calling up my pneumonic chunk. Those pneumonics go from ethereal to pretty raunchy but, hey, when you have to store that much information anything that works for you is good.
A pneumonic we all know is the info chunk we learned in our first days as student pilots—that old "GUMPS" check on final: (G)as, (U)ndercarriage, (M)ixture, (P)ropeller, (S)eatbelts. Just remember “GUMPS” and the final checklist is all chunked into it. I changed it a little when I started flying high performance, complex airplanes: (G)ear, (U)ndercarriage, (P)ut the gear down, (M)ake sure the gear are down (S)tupid! It may sound a bit glib but it works for me since forgetting to put the gear down, the most important info chunk on final, can happen to even the most experienced pilots. According to a US Air Force accident report, a USAF crew with thousands of flight hours forgot their short final chunk and landed gear up in a $285,000,000 B-1 Lancer in Diego Garcia on 09/25/2006. It cost us tax payers $8 million in damages to the aircraft and another $14,000 to repave the runway. Investigators said the failure to lower the landing gear was both pilots’ fault. The red warning light on the gear handle was blinking for more than 4 minutes on their final approach. My plane cost a fraction of that supersonic bomber beast but adds a gear warning horn that sounds if the plane is in landing configuration with the flaps out and VREF airspeed with the gear still stowed. Pretty cheap and simple but it would have saved all of us $8,014,000, and like I said, anything that works to help you recall important stuff. So, chunk as much information about your flight mission as possible, think like a chess pro, expand your brain’s RAM, and FLY SAFE like a “world-class” pro!
