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Chessville
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LIVE LONG AND PROSPER Did you know that your brain, has been described as the most complex structure in the observable universe?
No, our place in evolution is entirely down to our massive mental power, unique in known creation. So, the true answer is obvious. If you really want to live long and prosper, forget about jogging, jumping and honing those bronzed pectorals to glistening perfection. It's your brain you have to worry about. Amidst all the noisy worship of the body, worrying little warnings are already surfacing. Medically confirmed observations, for example, that 'super-fit' athletes are somehow more prone to colds and infections than the average mortal. That over-specialised physical fitness, in a curious way, erodes the immune system.
As the cover of his 'runaway best-seller' trumpeted: 'Fixx explains why runners feel better, live longer, enjoy a more vigorous life, sleep better and smoke and drink less than their sedentary friends. Here is the guide to total fitness.' Fixx ran ten miles every day, and dropped dead of a heart attack while jogging in North Vermont in 1984 at the age of 52.
Of course, one must strike a balance. I would not, for a moment, advocate a totally sedentary way of life as the ultimate goal. This was the trap which snared the Roman senator and polymath, Pliny the Elder (born AD24) described by contemporaries as: 'The most learned man of his age.' Biographer, historian, linguist, orator, lawyer, naturalist, political advisor to two emperors and blessed with an heroically enquiring mind, Pliny decided to investigate first-hand the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD.
Unfortunately, so entranced was he with the
life of the mind, that Pliny had neglected the physical completely and had
become accustomed to being carried everywhere in a palanquin by his slaves.
As the ash and pumice from Vesuvius rained down, the slaves, human nature
being what it is, did a runner and poor Pliny If Pliny neglected one side of the Graeco-Roman equation for the good life 'a healthy mind in a healthy body', mens sana in corpore sano-our culture is in danger of leaning too far the other way. But there is a useful corrective to the boredom of the jogging track, the horrors of the gym and the hysteria of the football pitch, namely, the pursuit of sports, certainly, but sports of the mind. In particular, what the Japanese refer to as 'the three games', chess, go and backgammon. By playing any, or all, of these or other mind-stretching games, such as bridge, crossword solving, draughts or scrabble, medical and psychological opinion now believes that you maximise your chances of a long and healthy life and, perhaps more importantly, one that remains at a high, even increasing, level of mental activity. Fitness and aerobics yes but aerobics for the mind! How long will we live? Three score years and ten is the most commonly quoted biblical estimate, yet the Book of Genesis itself suggests that man's span shall be an hundred and twenty years. More recent official figures for the UK put a woman's average life expectancy at 79.1 years and a man's at 73.8. But experts now believe that it should, with improved lifestyles and medical advances, be reasonable for all of us to reach 100. After all, the most rapidly increasing age group in the USA is the over-85s, already with 50,000+ centenarians in this ever-expanding group and a prediction of 1.2 million by the year 2050. Insurance companies devise actuarial tests to gauge longevity and, of course, their professional existence depends very much on getting this sort of thing right. Their questions divide up into fixed responses, i.e. items you cannot reasonably change, such as, are you male or female, or how long did your parents live? and variables, i.e. one's you can do something about.
Brain cells, or at least the ones that matter, do not inevitably die off as we age, nor do our mental powers automatically diminish. In fact, contrary to rumour and received opinion, brain power and articulacy can increase with age if the mind is kept active. The theory that we lose millions of brain cells every day, especially after a drink, has been widely accepted for years, but it is apocryphal. There is no scientific evidence for it, rather the contrary. Consider this statement from Professor Arnold Scheibel, then head of the Brain Research Institute at UCLA Los Angeles:
By playing tournament chess-you can take up serious Mind Sports for yourself, at little personal risk. It definitely won't involve undignified loping around city streets in your underwear, as the marathon does. There are further valuable lessons to be learnt from Mind Sports! The story is told that one committee meeting of the British Chess Federation had to be cancelled because the group was inquorate. Mr Soanes turned up, but Mr Ritson-Morry was in jail for embezzlement, while Mr Stammwitz was in jail for bigamy. His feeble protestations at the trial of: 'I forgot about the other one,' not unnaturally having been brushed aside. [Editor: Not to mention the infamous Claude Bloodgood!]
Indeed, there are many examples of those imprisoned for political reasons turning to chess as a way of keeping their brains occupied, while they were out of circulation. A notable example was the former Prime Minister of Israel, Menachim Begin, who helped to keep his formidable mental powers in shape whilst jailed by the British regime in Palestine.
There are also cases of strong chessplayers in
their own right finding themselves behind bars. For example, the two
US International Masters, Norman Whitaker and Raymond Weinstein were jailed
respectively for
Mortimer was, by profession, a dramatist and newspaper editor. The crime for which he was imprisoned was to refuse to reveal the author of an article which was sued for libel. While inside, Mortimer taught his fellow inmates how to play chess. This is all well and good, but I have recently had some new thoughts on this entire matter of how best to handle the criminal classes. Surely, by insisting on physical exercise, we are helping to breed stronger and fitter criminals to be unleashed on our streets. While by encouraging chess, or other mind games, we are assisting them to develop Moriarty-like cunning for their new forays, once released, against the law-abiding citizenry. No, after much thought I have come to a startling new conclusion. Following what I now term the 'Fixx-Pliny' model, the prison population should:
This way, we will ensure that instead of dangerously fit and intelligent malefactors being reintroduced into society, all recidivists would, in fact, be stunningly stupid, massively obese and totally ill-equipped to run away successfully from any crime they may commit in the future. My paper on this new penal approach is winging its way to HM Government at this very moment. I leave the last word to the evolutionary forces of Darwinian natural selection.
Keene On Chess is
Sponsored by...YOU!!
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Consider the facts. Your brain weighs
about the same as a bag of sugar, approximately 2% of body weight, yet the
brain alone accounts for up to 20% of your body's energy needs. A
million million nerve cells are packed into every human head and there are
as many cells between your ears as there are stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.
Each of these cells can be connected with up to 100,000 others and just
counting each possible nerve connection in the human brain cortex -- the
outer layer -- at the rate of one per second, would take 32 million years.
Indeed, humankind's privileged place on the
evolutionary ladder is not the result of powerful physique. Any
self-respecting tyrannosaurus would easily have seen off a feeble specimen
of Homo Sapiens, if such a temporally anomalous meeting had ever taken
place.
The most ghastly warning, of course, was the
sad case of James F. Fixx, super-fit athlete, guru of jogging and author of
The Complete Book of Running. Fixx set himself up as the High
Priest of Fitness. When he first discovered running as the universal
panacea, Fixx weighed nearly 16 stone and was breathing hard after the first
50 yards. He got down to 11 and a half stone, ran the equivalent of
once around the equator and competed in races and marathons all over the
world.
Then there are those embarrassing fitness
glitches that regularly seem to afflict US Presidents and presidential
hopefuls. One might mention Jimmy Carter collapsing very publicly
during a jogging session or Bob Dole
falling off his podium and taking most of the structure with him, just after
we had all seen him on television being super-fit and super-coordinated on a
running machine.
was left stranded: 'When
daylight finally returned, on the second day after they had last seen him,
his body was found intact and undamaged, wearing the same clothes he had put
on, his appearance more like one sleeping than one dead.' (Pliny the
Younger, letters, book six, letter 16). All of Pliny's independently
mobile slaves, by the way, survived the ordeal and lived to run another day.
At least, as the arithmetically alert amongst you will have noticed, the
sedentary Pliny outlived the super-fit Fixx by three years.
Interestingly, of the 20+ key questions which
are standardly set, it is an eye-opener to see the huge extent to which
mental performance, IQ and Mind Sports-related answers can make a
difference, accounting for a staggering leeway of up to 11.5 productive
years in your favour!
Additionally, research by Dr Gordon Shaw, also
of UCLA, shows that higher brain functions can be improved by listening to
Mozart's music. According to his research, this has a similar effect
on brainwaves to playing chess. Shaw compared three listening states
Mozart's Sonata in D Major for two Pianos, a relaxation tape and silence and
tested the subjects' spatial reasoning after each tape. In the short
term certainly listening to Mozart raised IQ scores by an average of nine
points above the other two tapes.
I used to hold the belief that teaching chess
in prisons was a good idea. A controlled regime of exercise ensures
that the inmates of our jails are kept physically fit during their sojourn.
It seemed, therefore, logical that improving the minds of those
incarcerated, by the teaching and general encouragement of chess would be a
beneficial parallel..jpg)
confidence trickery and murder. The Yugoslav
Grandmaster Milan Matulovic was sentenced to nine months for careless
driving after a fatal car crash, while the two world champions, Wilhelm
Steinitz and Bobby Fischer, both found themselves under arrest for bizarre
reasons. Steinitz, was arrested and accused of spying when the moves
of some of his correspondence games were intercepted. The authorities
suspected that the moves were coded military secrets.
Meanwhile, Bobby Fischer was arrested in
Pasadena in May 1981 under suspicion of being a bank robber. Other
chessplayers, including Alexandre Deschapelles, James Mortimer, Ludek
Pachman, Alex Wojtkiewicz and Vladimir Petrov, were all jailed for political
dissidence or matters of principle.
Professor John Townshend of the Syracuse
University of New York, has just completed an extensive anthropological
study, proving that the female of the species is far more attracted to
intelligent successful males than to the overtly good-looking ones.
Good-looking barman, Chris Johnson, is quoted in the London Sunday Times as
saying, 'I can't believe women will go for a fat, balding city boy over a
good-looking barman.' But if Professor Townshend is right, precisely
92% of women will do just that!
