The Expert Myth

do you bring this trick out at parties oh no it's a terrible party trick here we go 3.141592653589793 this is Grant Gusman he watched an old video of mine about how we think that there are two systems of thought system two is the conscious slow effortful system and system one is subconscious fast and automatic to explore how these systems work in his own head Grant decided to memorize 100 digits of pi then he just kept going he has now memorized 23,000 digits of pi in preparation to challenge the North American record 45493 03 8196 that's [Laughter] 200 that's amazing I have wanted to make a video about experts for a long time this is Magnus Carlson the five-time world chess champion he's being shown chess boards and asked to identify the game in which they occurred uh this looks an awful lot like T Bic whoops okay this is the 24th game from sevil obviously now I'm going to play through an opening and stop me when you recognize the game and if you can tell me who was playing Black in this one okay okay I'm sure you've seen this opening before okay it's going to be on against sabata how can he do this it seems like superhuman ability well decades ago scientist wanted to know what makes experts like Chess Masters special do they have incredibly High IQs much better spatial reasoning than average bigger short-term memory spans well it turns out that as a group Chess Masters are not exceptional on any of these measures but one experiment showed how their performance was vastly Superior to amateurs in 1973 William Chase and Herbert Simon recruited three chess players a master an a player who's an advanced amateur and a beginner a chess board was set up with around 25 pieces positioned as they might be during a game and each player was allowed to look at the board for 5 seconds then they were asked to replicate the setup from memory on a second board in front of them the players could take as many 5-second Peaks as they needed to get their board to match from just the first look the master could recall the positions of 16 pieces the a player could recall eight and the beginner only four the master only needed half the number of Peaks as ...