Monday, January 12, 2009

My Brilliant Brain - Make Me A Genius

Susan Polgar is the world's first female chess grandmaster. But she wasn't born with her brilliant brain - it was created by the unique experiment that dominated her childhood. From the age of four her father trained her for up to six hours a day at chess alone.




Growing up in the early 1970s, no woman had ever held the title of chess grandmaster. It was widely believed that female brains weren't wired with adequate spatial awareness for the game. Nowadays, memory and pattern recognition are recognised as they key areas used by experts in all fields - everyone from waiters to fire-fighters.





Neither of these however, has the trained memory of a chess grandmaster. Able to recreate a chess game glimpsed only on the side of a passing van, Susan's true genius is revealed when she plays an entire chess match over a mobile phone. Her opponent can see the board but she can't, instead using her memory to imagine the game.

More documentaries like this...

My Brilliant Brain - Born Genius

Brainman

God on the Brain

The Human Mind

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

very nice documentary. At the end there's an advert for another docu: "The boy who sees with no eyes". I found it on google video if you want to add it to the collection:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4498316499158278508&ei=DMJrSfPaD5OoiALlmKSqAw&q=the+boy+who+sees+without+eyes

Anonymous said...

pretty ridiculous feminist stance taken all the way through, trying to turn it into a 'women - yeah!' thing. it's obvious there are gender differences, but pretty much anyone intelligent knows that despite the differences we're worth an equal amount. and her mate she played on the phone might easily have been a complete chess-mong - hardly a good test. and that 'speeding' van was doing about 15mph too. bit silly tbh, she's amazing, why try and dress it up to make her look even more so?

Anonymous said...

She's an Ashkenazi Jew. There's a good good chance she's GENETICALLY predisposed to being a genius:
http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/culture/features/1478/

Anonymous said...

She's a Ashkenazi Jew - and could very well be predisposed to genius:

http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/culture/features/1478/