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Time, time, time...
Sep. 14th, 2013 08:02 pmI was in the Alco store in Pagosa on Thursday, standing in line to pay for a roll of packing tape, when I found myself immediately behind one of those people who, for some unknown reason, wait until their entire order has been rung up before reaching for their wallet.
Upon retrieving their wallet, they extract the exact number of bills to pay for the dollar amount, after which they "repack" their wallet, stash it back where it came from, and then reach into a different place to extract a change purse.
As it turned out, said change purse did not contain sufficient change (even after dumping the contents on the counter and sorting through the contents twice). There followed a laborious collection of said change and redeposition into the change purse, which was then replaced before again extracting the wallet to take out an additional dollar bill.
For some reason, while this little play was being acted out, I recalled a couple of items that seemed related.
Back in the 1970s, when I took chess seriously, I recall one bull session between tournament rounds during which Bill Goichberg—who ran about 99% of the USCF-rated tournaments in the NY metropolitain area in those days—set up an artificial position on a board, consisting of just a few pawns here and there. He claimed—if memory serves—that there was a correlation between a player's potential chess strength and the speed with which that player could maneuver a knight, starting on a1, so as to visit b1, c1, etc. to h1, and then to h2, g2, f2, etc., back to a2, and in this zig-zag manner visit each unoccupied square between a1 and a8 (i.e., skipping the squares with the pawns on them). For example, the first few moves, with a pawn standing on b3, might be: a1-c2-a3-b1-c3-e2-c1... and so on.
The correlation had to do, as one might expect, with speed. An individual's ability to solve this "problem" fast, suggested Goichberg, indicated greater chess potential than if said individual took a much longer time to reach the goal. I gave the problem a try, and the result suggested I had the potential to become an 1800 player, which disappointed me at the time, but ultimately turned out to be the case.
A similar idea was expressed in a 1994 book titled Chess Master... at any age, by Rolf Wetzell, who claimed something called "mental clock rate" (the speed with which one could calculate), along with memory, was one of five components of chess capability. And I think it's no great stretch to link that sort of "clock rate" to the ability to zoom through simple knight move calculations—giving no heed to position or strategy, but only to getting from here to there as quickly as possible via the specified route.
Wetzell's book is an interesting read in many other respects, and while it would be easy enough to dismiss the author's ideas out of hand, he (a) did become a chess master after his 50th birthday, and (b) appears to have independently arrived at a "theory of forgetting" that's very similar to what I understand of the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve.
At any rate, there have been moments in my life when I've experienced the results of having a "mental clock rate" that's a bit faster than that of the people I'm dealing with. A good example of said phenomenon occurred during a marvelous tête-à-tête that took place in Soviet times, in Kiev, during whichan Intourist a KGB official asked me if I was working for the CIA!
I immediately analyzed question and identified its inherent weakness: the only answer that made sense was "Yes"—if I actually was working for the CIA—since "No" meant that I was either telling the truth or I was lying, so what was the sense of asking me such a silly question, because if I actually did work for the CIA, wouldn't I most assuredly lie and say I didn't? Granted, this was not any kind of lengthy head-scratcher, but my response ("No") nevertheless came in "real time," i.e., without any apparent delay and appeared to satisfy my interlocutor.
Upon receiving change, the customer in front of me made a point of unlimbering the change purse, stowing the change, and replacing said purse before seizing the package of purchased goods and making room for me and my roll of tape.
It takes all kinds, I guess...
Upon retrieving their wallet, they extract the exact number of bills to pay for the dollar amount, after which they "repack" their wallet, stash it back where it came from, and then reach into a different place to extract a change purse.
As it turned out, said change purse did not contain sufficient change (even after dumping the contents on the counter and sorting through the contents twice). There followed a laborious collection of said change and redeposition into the change purse, which was then replaced before again extracting the wallet to take out an additional dollar bill.
For some reason, while this little play was being acted out, I recalled a couple of items that seemed related.
Back in the 1970s, when I took chess seriously, I recall one bull session between tournament rounds during which Bill Goichberg—who ran about 99% of the USCF-rated tournaments in the NY metropolitain area in those days—set up an artificial position on a board, consisting of just a few pawns here and there. He claimed—if memory serves—that there was a correlation between a player's potential chess strength and the speed with which that player could maneuver a knight, starting on a1, so as to visit b1, c1, etc. to h1, and then to h2, g2, f2, etc., back to a2, and in this zig-zag manner visit each unoccupied square between a1 and a8 (i.e., skipping the squares with the pawns on them). For example, the first few moves, with a pawn standing on b3, might be: a1-c2-a3-b1-c3-e2-c1... and so on.
The correlation had to do, as one might expect, with speed. An individual's ability to solve this "problem" fast, suggested Goichberg, indicated greater chess potential than if said individual took a much longer time to reach the goal. I gave the problem a try, and the result suggested I had the potential to become an 1800 player, which disappointed me at the time, but ultimately turned out to be the case.
A similar idea was expressed in a 1994 book titled Chess Master... at any age, by Rolf Wetzell, who claimed something called "mental clock rate" (the speed with which one could calculate), along with memory, was one of five components of chess capability. And I think it's no great stretch to link that sort of "clock rate" to the ability to zoom through simple knight move calculations—giving no heed to position or strategy, but only to getting from here to there as quickly as possible via the specified route.
Wetzell's book is an interesting read in many other respects, and while it would be easy enough to dismiss the author's ideas out of hand, he (a) did become a chess master after his 50th birthday, and (b) appears to have independently arrived at a "theory of forgetting" that's very similar to what I understand of the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve.
At any rate, there have been moments in my life when I've experienced the results of having a "mental clock rate" that's a bit faster than that of the people I'm dealing with. A good example of said phenomenon occurred during a marvelous tête-à-tête that took place in Soviet times, in Kiev, during which
I immediately analyzed question and identified its inherent weakness: the only answer that made sense was "Yes"—if I actually was working for the CIA—since "No" meant that I was either telling the truth or I was lying, so what was the sense of asking me such a silly question, because if I actually did work for the CIA, wouldn't I most assuredly lie and say I didn't? Granted, this was not any kind of lengthy head-scratcher, but my response ("No") nevertheless came in "real time," i.e., without any apparent delay and appeared to satisfy my interlocutor.
Upon receiving change, the customer in front of me made a point of unlimbering the change purse, stowing the change, and replacing said purse before seizing the package of purchased goods and making room for me and my roll of tape.
It takes all kinds, I guess...
