Shelby Lyman on Chess: Chess and the Brain
Sunday, January 10, 2016
(Published in print: Sunday, January 10, 2016)
We recently offered anecdotal evidence that chess might be useful in moderating the ravages of aging such as dementia.
Michael Ciamarra, an Alabama chess aficionado and columnist who conducts a program called Brain Games for Healthy Living, testifies on his personal website to the ubiquitousness of such afflictions and to possible remedies, including chess, in an article titled “Checkmating Alzheimer’s.”
The size of the problem is astonishing. One third of all seniors, we are told, will die of Alzheimer’s. “By 2050,” Ciamarra writes, “the cost of care for Alzheimer’s is projected to balloon from $203 billion to $1.2 trillion.”
The combined emotional and material devastation to individual families and other caregivers is virtually incalculable.
But why chess and other mind sports?
The answer is simple: They stimulate cognitive areas of the brain.
Dr. Stuart Brown, a psychiatrist and clinical researcher, wrote in his 2009 book Play: “One prospective study done at Albert Einstein and Syracuse universities showed that for people who had the most cognitive activity (doing puzzles, reading, engaging in mentally challenging work), the chances of getting Alzheimer’s disease were 63 percent lower than that of the general population.”
Mind games may offer both prevention and a palliative effect and, for a few, may offer a possible remedy.
But a broader approach would restructure education and work so as to limit the chronic mindlessness that so often prevails.
More here.
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