A Visualization Experiment

I’m not the most right brained person.  When somebody says to close your eyes and picture something in your mind, I picture blackness. I may have come up with a way to fix this that won’t take any time away from other chess studies.

First, I’m taking a game I’m familiar with (Carlsen-Aronian from the Sinquefield Cup) and reading only the moves, slowly, into recording software on my pc.

Next, I’ve been experimenting with binaural beats.  There’s research that shows they work, and there’s research that shows they don’t.  I figure what’s it going to hurt. 

So, I’m overlaying the recording of my voice over a binaural beat geared toward improving visualization and saving it as an mp3.

Then, when I go to bed, I’m going to listen to it as I go to sleep and try to visualize each move.  I figure if I do this for a few weeks, it will provide two benefits.

First, hopefully it will improve my visualization of the chess board.

Second, I’ll have the game memorized.  The benefit of this is that once it’s memorized, I can practice visualization whenever, wherever I want to just by closing my eyes and playing through the game.

The experiment begins tonight.  If I’m not back in 18 hours, send help.  Or Whiskey.

In other news, Nakamura has black against Ivanchuck today at 9am ET.  Nakamura is ½ point behind Gelfand, who has black against Caruana.  I’ll have both games commentated later today. The games can be watched live at http://livegames.fide.com/paris2013/live_video.html.

Finally, my latest game.  I think I’m getting a little better at blunders.  I’m still making them, but they’re more “sophisticated.”  I’m not just hanging pieces, although I did miss a mate in one against myself in another game recently so there’s still a lot of work to do.

I've never seen a purple cow,

I never hope to see one.

But I can tell you, anyhow

I'd rather see, than be one.

Gelett Burgess

Dave