Avert brain drain
By ANDY SOLTIS
Last Updated: 7:38 AM, March 21, 2010
Posted: 1:12 AM, March 21, 2010
The world’s top-rated player says you can be too smart to play chess.
“Being too intelligent” can “get in your way,” Magnus Carlsen, the 19-year-old Norwegian super-GM, told the magazine Der Spiegel.
He cited the case of Britain’s John Nunn, who at 15 became the youngest student at Oxford in 500 years. Nunn had considerable chess talent and became a solid grandmaster but never got close to the world championship.
“His enormous powers of understanding and his constant search for knowledge distracted him from chess,” said Carlsen.
Carlsen, who said he memorizes episodes of “House,” was repeating a theory of Sherlock Holmes, who helped inspire the TV series. Holmes told Dr. Watson, in “A Study in Scarlet,” that he had never heard of the solar system and didn’t want to know about it. There is just so much room in the human brain, and the additional information about planets and orbits was bound to push out something useful, he said.
Carlsen, who said he isn’t “a disciplined thinker,” said he doesn’t know his IQ — and wouldn’t want to know it. “It might turn out to be a nasty surprise,” he said.
Source: http://www.nypost.com
The capacity of the human mind is limitless.
The belief that is limited is only just that, a belief.
We should not be afraid of the dark but rather walk confidently knowing that soon we will be walking in the light of the day.
We should be grateful to Calsen for debunking the idea of any relation between “playing chess” and “being smart”. Nobody could do this better than him. So, from now on, let’s forget about getting smarter by playing chess. That’s not a valid selling point anymore.
very interesting comments by Carlsen. Especially as one gets older, one tends to dislike filling the brain with information that doesnt have practical foreseeable use