Chess grandmasters may outwit opponents using different brain regions from us lesser mortals
Mid-match activity in grandmasters' brains is mainly in regions thought to be involved in long-term memory - the frontal and parietal cortices, find Thomas Elbert and his colleagues at the University of Konstanz in Germany.
Amateurs rely more on the medial temporal lobe, which helps to encode new information, suggesting that they analyse situations afresh.
The finding supports the idea that expertise depends on stored memory chunks that are called up when needed. Chess players are a nice model of the 'chunking' theory, says Elbert, as grandmasters commit so many game patterns to memory.
More experienced players have seen more chess matches, agrees British grandmaster Jon Speelman, which means that they spend less time getting to grips with new puzzles.
"It's like learning a language," says Speelman. "It isn't something you do consciously. You have a large number of patterns so you can see viable moves quickly, although you don't know they are good moves until you check."
But memory chunks are not the whole story, Elbert points out. Grandmasters derive their genius not only from how much they memorize, but from how they organize and retrieve their memories, he says.