IND NN

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Current scenario
The current state of neonatal health in India is indeed dismal to state the least. Three neonates are dying every minute in India and every 4th baby born is low birth weight! Out of 3.9 million neonatal deaths worldwide, India is accounting to 1.2 million or nearly 30% of global neonatal mortality! The present figure of 40 per 1,000 live births is too high. Furthermore, there is great diversity of NMR in different states and BIMARU states together constitute over half of all newborn deaths in India. Most neonatal deaths are caused by preventable and/or treatable diseases. Infections, birth asphyxia, and prematurity are the leading causes of neonatal deaths in India.


//////////////////////The big questionIs capitalism is making us ill? Oliver James has another bite at the cherry in The Selfish Capitalist, says Madeleine Bunting Saturday January 5, 2008The Guardian
Buy The Selfish Capitalist at the Guardian bookshop
The Selfish Capitalist: The Origins of Affluenza by Oliver James 400pp, Vermilion, £14.99
Oliver James is an assiduous trawler of the densest psychological and psychiatric studies to retrieve the nuggets of wisdom buried therein. He's also a modern day missionary, fired with a passionate desire to relieve the growing emotional suffering in rich countries, which has led the World Health Organisation to predict that depression is on track to become the second most widespread disease, after heart disease, in the developed world by 2020. His writing career has been an attempt to marry these two impulses (which can often tug in opposite directions) and thus bring to a wider public the growing body of research, particularly in the US, into what constitutes human well-being and why it appears to be in decline.


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But is James the meticulous researcher or the proselytiser? The dilemma as to which takes precedence has dogged his books. In the past he has swept from analysing Mia Farrow's penchant for adopting children to the fine detail of academic studies of the life outcomes of the offspring of large families. Such transitions can feel very bumpy - quite apart from publishers finding it difficult to know to whom they are marketing the book.
James's wrestling with different ways of presenting his argument takes a new form this time round. A year ago he brought out Affluenza: How to Be Successful and Stay Sane, which skirted close to the self-help genre with its checklists for self-diagnosis, instructions on how to put the malaise right and enliveningly lurid anecdotes about a colourful range of characters suffering badly from affluenza. Now comes The Selfish Capitalist, a "companion volume" which prompts questions such as did he forget - or subsequently discover - some material? Or does it mean that the author is having two bites at the cherry? In fact the backstory is that this book started life as an appendix to Affluenza but ballooned to unmanageable length and was cut. It's now been resurrected as a new book detailing the academic research that underpins the ideas he explores.
So if Affluenza was the proselytiser's tract, this is the researcher's reasoned treatise; it's an awkward compromise because it looks as if James hasn't decided how to win the battle of ideas. Having tried to convert one audience with populism, he now wants to reinforce his case with some intellectual rigour. There's plenty of reason to sympathise with what he is trying to do, but the strategy runs the risk of denting the impact of both books. Neither achieves that elusive goal of the "must-read" which permanently reshapes a debate and penetrates the political/policy worlds as, say, Robert Putnam did in his book on social capital, Bowling Alone. There is a possibility that if James had taken more time to weld his material into one book, he might have achieved a comparable shift in our understanding of mental health. Instead, when reading The Selfish Capitalist one is hampered by the sense that this is vaguely familiar ground.
That's a great shame because James is charting the new frontiers in psychology which have the potential to be the most significant indictment yet of the form of market capitalism that has held sway across the English speaking world for the past generation. As the burgeoning happiness-book industry - led, curiously, by economists such as Richard Layard, and political scientist Robert Lane - have well established, our hugely increased wealth over the past half century has done nothing to increase our happiness. Where James now develops the argument further is in pointing out that not only does market capitalism have little impact on improving levels of happiness, but it actually increases certain types of mental illness.
Given the frequency with which reports appear in the media about rising levels of emotional distress (anxiety, panic attacks, depression) among children and teenagers, James will find a receptive audience, eager for explanations. Whether they will be convinced by his argument that market capitalism is the cause of mental ill-health is another matter; we have had various competing explanations for social ills in recent decades, usually sponsored by the right, ranging from rising divorce rates and moral breakdown to decline in religion. James has now provided the left - if one can still talk in such terms - with a powerful counter-argument: our emotional malaise is not an accidental byproduct of market capitalism, but a direct result of increased competitiveness and the way that it exploits our insecurities.
The single most important idea to which James needs to apply all his missionary zeal is that mental well-being is a public health issue. Happiness is not a matter of personal performance and effort ("I've achieved it" or "why have I failed?") but a product of a set of environmental - social, economic and cultural - circumstances. The highly unequal, competitive, materialistic and individualistic cultures of neo-liberal economies produce emotional distress; they cultivate the insecurities which drive hyper consumerism ... and thus they make us ill. In the most telling analogy of the book, James argues that materialism is to ill-being what smoking is to lung cancer.
Drawing extensively on the work of American psychologist Tim Kasser, James argues that our recent increased wealth has come at the cost of the emotional well-being of a large proportion of the population; rates of distress among women in the UK almost doubled between 1982 and 2000. This is true of New Zealand and Australia as well as the UK and the US, in striking contrast with more egalitarian and collectivist countries such as Denmark or Germany. He tracks how "selfish capitalism" generates insecurity and inflates comparisons; how a winner-takes-all competitiveness merely creates losers and a pandemic of low self esteem, with its compensatory pathologies around celebrity and status.
Remarkably, Erich Fromm, the Marxist psychoanalyst and Buddhist writer, foresaw much of this half a century ago and James quotes his prescient analysis of the "passive, empty, anxious, isolated person for whom life has no meaning" and who compensates through "compulsive consumption". There are interesting issues to draw out of Fromm's work about how our mass consumer societies, ironically, cripple personal agency despite their avowals of individual choice, but James doesn't dwell on this. In fact, agency remains a confused thread in his argument: exactly who is the selfish capitalist? And is there a hint of a conspiracy theory as to how selfish capitalism has "hijacked" the English-speaking world to establish a political economy which benefits only a wealthy elite? He refers to an "invisible hand" which suppresses those ideas which challenge selfish capitalism, lulling us all into a false consciousness, but one wishes he would come clean, name the culprits and provide an explanation of why and how they hoodwink us.
This is where the book is least convincing, as James attempts to explain why "selfish capitalism" has taken hold across the world, why democracies have - contrary to both their economic and emotional interests - elected Thatcher, Reagan, George Bush and New Labour (on this last, his disillusionment is vicious). He takes pot-shots at Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene for providing some intellectual cover, and even at Richard Layard's influential advocacy of cognitive behaviour therapy, accusing it of being a sticking plaster for a sick society which encourages individuals to think positively rather than challenge the status quo. But he concludes with a disclaimer that these are "hares which other researchers may wish to chase", which is a bit of cop-out. He could have taken more time and thought through parts of his thesis more rigorously, to ensure that it captures the political agenda in the way it needs to; is this playfulness or dilettantism? Either way it is at odds with the seriousness of what's at stake.
To follow James's analogy with smoking: it took roughly 50 years from the first serious evidence of its harm to health to the point last year when smoking in public places was banned in the whole of the United Kingdom. We are now at the beginning of the cycle and James has played a major part in popularising vital ideas; but ahead lies a long, slow slog against powerful vested interests to win the battle.


////////////////////////TOXIC AFFLUENZA


////////////////////////////SLPT-NO PHOPISHTWENTYGIRI


///////////////////////Secrets of Weight Loss Revealed!
A little is easy, a lot is hard, and results may vary.
Jacob Sullum January 2008 Print Edition
Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss—and the Myths and Realities of Dieting, by Gina Kolata, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 257 pages, $24Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, by Brian Wansink, New York: Bantam Books, 276 pages, $25Gina Kolata says losing weight is nearly impossible. Brian Wansink says it’s easy. But they don’t really contradict each other, because they’re talking about different kinds of weight loss.Although their new books offer very different messages for dieters, Kolata and Wansink share a suspicion of collectivist responses to the “obesity epidemic.” Both writers are intensely interested in the question of why people weigh as much as they do, but they do not leap from research findings to policy prescriptions aimed at making us thinner by restricting our choices. At a time when almost every discussion of weight in America seems to end with a list of things the government should do about it, their restraint is commendable. In Rethinking Thin, Kolata, a veteran New York Times science reporter, focuses on a group of obese people enrolled in a University of Pennsylvania diet study. They exhibit the usual pattern of initial success followed by setbacks, typically ending up about as fat as they were to begin with. She uses these case studies to illustrate her general point that “very few people lose substantial amounts of weight and keep it off” because genetic factors play a large role in determining how much a given person will weigh as an adult.By contrast, in Mindless Eating, Wansink, a marketing professor at Cornell University who has studied consumers’ food-related decisions for decades, focuses on the sort of gradual, modest weight loss that Kolata concedes is achievable. Declaring that “the best diet is the one you don’t know you’re on,” he urges small changes in everyday behavior that over the course of a year can result in a weight loss of 10 to 25 pounds. His book will not be much help to people like the research subjects Kolata interviews, who generally want to lose 50 to 100 pounds.Kolata’s message, as it pertains to the very fat, is mostly discouraging, while Wansink’s, which is addressed mainly to the somewhat overweight, is relentlessly upbeat. But both distinguish themselves from the “obesity epidemic” doomsayers by casting a skeptical eye on efforts to make Americans thinner through social engineering. They show that it’s possible to discuss the issue of weight without laying out a Plan of Action that treats us all as an undifferentiated blob of blubber.Kolata, whose reporting on subjects ranging from breast implants to pesticide residues has been admirably resistant to the health scare du jour, questions the conventional wisdom that weighing “too much” is unhealthy. Like other dissenters from the War on Fat, such as University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos and University of Chicago political scientist Eric Oliver (see “Lay Off the Fatties!,” November 2006), she tells fat people they will probably stay that way but simultaneously reassures them that the medical implications are not as dire as they’ve heard.Many of the health risks associated with obesity may be due to the poor diets and sedentary habits associated with fatness rather than the extra pounds per se. Kolata notes that it’s unclear whether exceeding the government’s recommended weight range is inherently hazardous or whether fat people who become thinner thereby become healthier. Yet scientists who point out such inconvenient facts can expect to be pilloried for failing to toe the party line. Kolata describes the dismay of two researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Katherine Flegal and David Williamson, at the anger they provoked from their colleagues by suggesting that the death toll the government had attributed to excessive weight was greatly exaggerated.In a 2005 study published by The Journal of the American Medical Association, Flegal, Williamson, and two other researchers reported that people the government considers “overweight” have lower mortality rates than people with supposedly “healthy” weights. They were criticized not so much for being wrong as for being unhelpful. “Your patients likely did not read the original article,” said an editorial in the journal Obesity Management, “but they did likely hear about it in the news and the message they got was not to worry so much about overweight and obesity. I do not think this is the message you want them to have.” That response was typical, Flegal tells Kolata: “Everyone thinks they already know the answer.…All these people who just know weight loss is good for you. It’s just taken for granted regardless of the evidence.”So is the feasibility of major, permanent weight loss, Kolata argues, for the most part persuasively. Her litany of diet fads, ranging from Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s 1825 bestseller The Physiology of Taste to The Atkins Diet Revolution, The Zone, and The South Beach Diet, shows that hope springs eternal in the plump torso, a point confirmed by her often poignant personal histories of dieters. A fat man who, like most of the subjects in the University of Pennsylvania study, has tried many different diets, losing and regaining hundreds of pounds, tells her: “In your brain, you say, ‘I have 100 percent free will. I have total control over what I eat.’ But in the experience of my life, in the experience of my day, in the experiences that have been thrust upon me, I don’t have that control.”Kolata’s discussion of obesity research suggests that false hope is not limited to people trying to lose weight. Scientists too are perpetually reaching for a weight loss key that always seems just beyond their fingertips: the right diet, the right drug, the right hormone.
Kolata’s main explanation for the failure of these efforts is that people are genetically programmed for a certain weight range, which varies widely from one individual to another. Twin studies indicate that genetic differences account for something like 70 percent of variation in weight. “The body’s metabolism speeds up or slows down to keep weight within a narrow range” of “20 to 30 pounds,” Kolata writes. While losing 20 or 30 pounds would count as success for most Americans whom the government considers overweight, it would be just a start for the study subjects on whom Kolata focuses.
The idea of predetermined weight ranges is consistent with much everyday experience: People tend to return to a particular weight after gaining a few pounds from holiday overeating, for example, or after losing pounds during an illness. It also jibes with the complaints of people who say they easily gain weight while friends can eat whatever they want and stay thin. Kolata describes research that backs up these anecdotes, including experiments showing the difficulty that thin people have in gaining weight as well as the difficulty that fat people have in losing it. In both cases, the weight tends to spring back after the experiment is over. One reason: Fat people have more fat cells than thin people, and when they lose weight the cells don’t disappear; they just get smaller. Likewise, thin people have fewer fat cells, and when they gain weight the cells don’t multiply; they just expand. Partly because of the signals sent by these fat cells, but also because of how those signals are conveyed to and interpreted by the brain, obese people do not feel satiated as soon as thin people do.
There is also evidence that their hunger is more intense. Kolata notes that the food-obsessed, sneaky, guilt-ridden behavior of fat people on diets is similar to the behavior of thin experimental subjects who are deliberately underfed. “A lot of thin people think that because they can skip a meal and feel a bit hungry, everyone can do the same,” one obesity researcher tells her. “They assume the sensation of hunger is the same for everyone.” They’re wrong, says Kolata: “Fat people are fat because their drive to eat is very different from the drive in thin people.”
In Kolata’s view, that point is not contradicted by the fact that some people, such as former Arkansas governor (and current GOP presidential candidate) Mike Huckabee, have gone from obese to thin and managed to stay that way. It can be done, she concedes, but it takes a strong exercise of willpower—more willpower than most people need to avoid being obese in the first place—and a lifelong struggle. The fact that people like Huckabee are famous for losing a lot of weight (more than 100 pounds in his case) and keeping it off suggests how rare that accomplishment is, as does obese people’s eagerness to undergo radical weight-reduction surgery that messes around with their stomachs and intestines. “In trying to lose weight,” Rockefeller University obesity researcher Jeffrey Friedman writes in an article Kolata quotes, “the obese are fighting a difficult battle. It is a battle against biology, a battle that only the intrepid take on and one in which only a few prevail.”But predetermined weight ranges take us only so far. They do not explain why some people are thin for decades and obese thereafter. Nor do they account for the “obesity epidemic” of the last few decades. According to data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (which includes actual measurements of height and weight), the share of American adults who qualify as obese has more than doubled since the late 1970s, reaching 33 percent by 2004. The official cutoff for obesity is based on body mass index (BMI), which is weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared. A man who is five feet, nine inches tall—me, for example—is deemed obese at a BMI of 30, equivalent to a weight of 203 pounds.
Meanwhile, the share of Americans who are considered merely “overweight,” with BMIs from 25 to 29.9 (170 to 202 pounds for me), has increased only slightly, hovering around a third. At 175 pounds, I am “overweight” but not “obese,” with a BMI of 25.8. If I lost six pounds, as my doctor has advised me to do, I would achieve the magical BMI of 24.9, giving me a “healthy” weight. But if I fail to do so, I suppose I shouldn’t feel too bad, since two-thirds of American adults weigh more than the government thinks they should. Although almost all of the BMI shift has occurred in the “obese” category, that doesn’t mean the weight gains have been big. If I weighed 202 pounds, for example, and gained a pound, that would make me obese instead of just overweight. So small changes in weight in large numbers of people, shifting some from “healthy” to “overweight” and others from “overweight” to “obese,” would be enough to account for the BMI trends bemoaned by public health officials. In other words, the “obesity epidemic” is not necessarily inconsistent with the idea that adults tend to stay within a 20-to-30-pound weight range.Still, the question remains: Why did so many people gain weight during the 1980s and ’90s? Since it takes longer than a couple of decades for genetic predispositions to change, Kolata suggests that early-life factors such as better nutrition, vaccination, and the availability of antibiotics somehow affected “the brain circuits that control eating” in people who came of age during the last few decades. But this hypothesis is highly speculative, with only limited animal studies to support it. For reasons that are unclear, Kolata rejects more plausible explanations, implying there’s no evidence that Americans are eating more or exercising less than we used to. But that’s not quite true.In addition to weighing and measuring people, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey asks them what they eat. These numbers indicate that food consumption by both men and women jumped by about 200 calories a day between the late 1970s and the late ’80s to early ’90s. Self-reports on this subject may not be completely reliable, but the increase is striking, especially since it coincides with a spike in obesity. As for calorie expenditure, a 2005 National Academy of Sciences report found that, contrary to popular belief, survey data do not indicate a decline in exercise during leisure time in the last few decades. But the report also noted that American jobs, housework, and transportation became less and less physically demanding throughout the 20th century, resulting in “a substantial decline in physical activity levels in the workplace, at home, and in travel over a long period.” Although this trend is by no means restricted to the 1980s and ’90s, it suggests that we could be burning fewer calories overall even if we are spending just as much time deliberately exercising. Modest increases in calorie consumption and/or decreases in calorie expenditure would be enough to cause the seemingly dramatic shift in weight the government has labeled an “epidemic.”Enter Brian Wansink. He’s all about little changes that add up over time. He concedes that the body resists big, sudden movements in weight. “It’s estimated that over 95 percent of all people who lose weight on a diet gain it back,” he writes. “Deprivation diets don’t work for three reasons: 1) Our body fights against them; 2) our brain fights against then; and 3) our day-to-day environment fights against them.” Wansink’s recommendations, which are derived from his research on the cues that lead people to overeat, are designed to achieve the loss of up to half a pound a week, which he says is below the threshold that would trigger a metabolic response. He urges readers to use “the mindless margin”—the 100 or 200 calories a day they would not really miss if they gave them up—to gradually move toward the bottom of their weight ranges.Even if you have no interest in following Wansink’s advice, the book is worth reading for his breezy, entertaining accounts of Candid Camera–ready studies in which people stuff themselves with stale popcorn because it’s in a big container, keep slurping soup from a surreptitiously replenished bowl, or eat more in restaurants because of music, menu language, or the ostensible origin of a complimentary glass of cheap red wine. Wansink’s overarching point is that, when it comes to food, we’re not paying attention. “It takes up to 20 minutes for our body and brain to signal satiation,” he notes, and Americans often finish their meals in less time than that. Instead of internal signals we rely on external cues to tell us when we’re done: Is the plate clean? Is everyone else done? Is there more in the serving dish?To counteract such cues, Wansink recommends such tactics as using smaller plates (which make portions seem larger), keeping serving dishes in the kitchen (which discourages second helpings), replacing short, wide glasses with tall, thin ones (which make drinks seem bigger), keeping food scraps and bones on your plate (which reminds you how much you’ve eaten), and dividing snacks from big packages into smaller bags or plastic containers (which discourages you from devouring the entire package). Wansink, who wants readers to know that he “enjoys both French food and French fries each week,” advocates eating more mindfully, to increase enjoyment as well as to improve nutrition. But he thinks it’s unrealistic to expect people to constantly count their calories in the face of the myriad food-related decisions they make each day. In his view it pays to plan ahead, in effect tricking yourself into eating less.Despite their differences in tone and focus, Kolata and Wansink are equally unenthusiastic about proposals by fat warriors such as Yale obesity expert Kelly Brownell to reshape Americans by reshaping our “food environment” through propaganda, censorship, taxes, and regulation. Kolata says there’s no reason to think the government knows how to make people thinner. She notes that even well-funded, intensive efforts aimed at slimming down captive audiences of schoolchildren have produced disappointing results, making proposals such as restricting cereal commercials, banning soda machines from schools, and distributing federally funded fruit to students look even lamer.
Wansink, for his part, says labeling and education don’t make much of a difference, and “we cannot legislate or tax people into eating Brussels sprouts.” Although he has spent much of his career studying ways in which businesses encourage people to buy, he recognizes the limitations of these techniques and does not portray them as inherently sinister. “Do food companies put ingredients in their food that they know we will eat and love?” he writes. “Absolutely—they are guilty as charged. So is your grandmother.” Wansink emphasizes consumer self-help rather than protection from conniving capitalists. A chapter called “The Hidden Persuaders Around Us,” a phrase that echoes the title of the 1957 Vance Packard book that portrayed advertisers as insidious manipulators of desire, is mostly about tricks people can use to avoid eating mindlessly. Instead of remaking the world to discourage overeating, Wansink says, “we can reengineer our personal food environment to help us and our families eat better.”
Kolata and Wansink share a concern about the experiences of actual individuals, a welcome respite from the cold collectivism that characterizes most discussions of obesity. Kolata devotes much space to the struggles of particular dieters, while Wansink emphasizes that he is offering not a one-size-fits-all diet but a set of suggestions that readers who want to lose weight can use to put together plans that work best for them. Instead of asking what the government should do about our flab, these books leave us alone with our bathroom scales to weigh the question for ourselves. Senior Editor Jacob Sullum is a nationally syndicated columnist.


JUST EAT LESS,MOSTLY PLANTS


////////////////////////TOP DOG TO UNDER DOG



/////////////////////SUPERWINE TO BOOST LIFESPAN

Would you drink wine made from genetically engineered grapes if it had extra benefits? Such wine could be on the menu, thanks to a grape variety six times richer than normal in resveratrol, the compound in red wine associated with increased longevity, decreased heart disease and a host of other benefits.
Yuejin Wang and colleagues at the Northwest Agricultural and Forestry University in Yangling, Shaanxi province, China, made the supervine by equipping it with an extra gene from a wild Chinese vine. Vitus pseudoreticulata has an unusual variant of the stilbene synthase gene, which triggers resveratrol production (Plant Cell, Tissue and Organ Culture, DOI: 10.1007/s11240-007-9324-2).
The team plans to make wine from the GM vine, though their main goal is to make grapevines more resistant to fungus, which is kept in check by resveratrol.



////////////////////////Some interesting points by Dr Shermer, when mentioning God and telling us that the problem with us is that we hook our faith in gaps in scientific knowledge was quite interesting especially as science comes the latin 'scienta' meaning knowledge.Science is knowledge, the word just evolved.


////////////////////SICK,SICKR,SICKR,FLICKR THEN DTH-RIP



/////////////////////HOMELESS IN VS=The number of chronically homeless people across the United States has dropped by 11.5 percent thanks to an increased focus on providing counseling and housing rather than police crackdowns or emergency shelter beds, federal officials said Wednesday.
The drop was reflected in a report released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development showing that between 2005 and 2006, the number of chronically homeless people in America's streets declined from 175,900 to 155,600. The data came from homeless counts conducted in 3,900 cities and counties, including San Francisco and other Bay Area cities.



///////////////////The bottom line is that the world is round, humans evolved from an extinct species and Elvis is dead," Weissmann said



/////////////////////Naps May Boost Memory


//////////////////Be vegetarian Walk Volunteer



////////////////////How to pace your snacking during commuteI keep legal (i.e. healthy) snacks in the car for my one hour drive home everyday. I make my snack last by playing a game. I wait until the last 25 miles of the drive before I open the snack. I take a small bite, then a drink of water and continue alternating one bite and one drink every mile. By the time I'm home, I am satisfied enough to prepare supper and not be too hungry while I'm cooking.

ALSO CALLED ALTISM AND METHODISM



///////////////////////TRANSPORTATION How to get a seat on subway after busy eventMany times after a sporting event or concert everyone is jamming on to a subway (especially in one direction) and there are no seats available. To have a more comfortable ride, take the subway one stop away in the opposite direction of where the big crowd is heading then hop on the subway heading back in the way you want to go. This works like a charm in many cities and is a much more comfortable ride and can save you time during very crowded travel times



////////////////////////sci am=The Expert Mind
Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well
By Philip E. Ross
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A man walks along the inside of a circle of chess tables, glancing at each for two or three seconds before making his move. On the outer rim, dozens of amateurs sit pondering their replies until he completes the circuit. The year is 1909, the man is Jos¿ Ra¿l Capablanca of Cuba, and the result is a whitewash: 28 wins in as many games. The exhibition was part of a tour in which Capablanca won 168 games in a row.
How did he play so well, so quickly? And how far ahead could he calculate under such constraints? "I see only one move ahead," Capablanca is said to have answered, "but it is always the correct one."
He thus put in a nutshell what a century of psychological research has subsequently established: much of the chess master's advantage over the novice derives from the first few seconds of thought. This rapid, knowledge-guided perception, sometimes called apperception, can be seen in experts in other fields as well. Just as a master can recall all the moves in a game he has played, so can an accomplished musician often reconstruct the score to a sonata heard just once. And just as the chess master often finds the best move in a flash, an expert physician can sometimes make an accurate diagnosis within moments of laying eyes on a patient.
But how do the experts in these various subjects acquire their extraordinary skills? How much can be credited to innate talent and how much to intensive training? Psychologists have sought answers in studies of chess masters. The collected results of a century of such research have led to new theories explaining how the mind organizes and retrieves information. What is more, this research may have important implications for educators. Perhaps the same techniques used by chess players to hone their skills could be applied in the classroom to teach reading, writing and arithmetic.
The Drosophila of Cognitive Science The history of human expertise begins with hunting, a skill that was crucial to the survival of our early ancestors. The mature hunter knows not only where the lion has been; he can also infer where it will go. Tracking skill increases, as repeated studies show, from childhood onward, rising in "a linear relationship, all the way out to the mid-30s, when it tops out," says John Bock, an anthropologist at California State University, Fullerton. It takes less time to train a brain surgeon.
The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born.
Without a demonstrably immense superiority in skill over the novice, there can be no true experts, only laypeople with imposing credentials. Such, alas, are all too common. Rigorous studies in the past two decades have shown that professional stock pickers invest no more successfully than amateurs, that noted connoisseurs distinguish wines hardly better than yokels, and that highly credentialed psychiatric therapists help patients no more than colleagues with less advanced degrees. And even when expertise undoubtedly exists--as in, say, teaching or business management--it is often hard to measure, let alone explain.
Skill at chess, however, can be measured, broken into components, subjected to laboratory experiments and readily observed in its natural environment, the tournament hall. It is for those reasons that chess has served as the greatest single test bed for theories of thinking--the "Drosophila of cognitive science," as it has been called.
The measurement of chess skill has been taken further than similar attempts with any other game, sport or competitive activity. Statistical formulas weigh a player's recent results over older ones and discount successes according to the strength of one's opponents. The results are ratings that predict the outcomes of games with remarkable reliability. If player A outrates player B by 200 points, then A will on average beat B 75 percent of the time. This prediction holds true whether the players are top-ranked or merely ordinary. Garry Kasparov, the Russian grandmaster who has a rating of 2812, will win 75 percent of his games against the 100th-ranked grandmaster, Jan Timman of the Netherlands, who has a rating of 2616. Similarly, a U.S. tournament player rated 1200 (about the median) will win 75 percent of the time against someone rated 1000 (about the 40th percentile). Ratings allow psychologists to assess expertise by performance rather than reputation and to track changes in a given player's skill over the course of his or her career.
Another reason why cognitive scientists chose chess as their model--and not billiards, say, or bridge--is the game's reputation as, in German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's words, "the touchstone of the intellect." The feats of chess masters have long been ascribed to nearly magical mental powers. This magic shines brightest in the so-called blindfold games in which the players are not allowed to see the board. In 1894 French psychologist Alfred Binet, the co-inventor of the first intelligence test, asked chess masters to describe how they played such games. He began with the hypothesis that they achieved an almost photographic image of the board, but he soon concluded that the visualization was much more abstract. Rather than seeing the knight's mane or the grain of the wood from which it is made, the master calls up only a general knowledge of where the piece stands in relation to other elements of the position. It is the same kind of implicit knowledge that the commuter has of the stops on a subway line.
The blindfolded master supplements such knowledge with details of the game at hand as well as with recollections of salient aspects of past games. Let us say he has somehow forgotten the precise position of a pawn. He can find it, as it were, by considering the stereotyped strategy of the opening--a well-studied phase of the game with a relatively limited number of options. Or he can remember the logic behind one of his earlier moves--say, by reasoning: "I could not capture his bishop two moves ago; therefore, that pawn must have been standing in the way...." He does not have to remember every detail at all times, because he can reconstruct any particular detail whenever he wishes by tapping a well-organized system of connections.
Of course, if the possession of such intricately structured knowledge explains not only success at blindfold play but also other abilities of chess masters, such as calculation and planning, then expertise in the game would depend not so much on innate abilities as on specialized training. Dutch psychologist Adriaan de Groot, himself a chess master, confirmed this notion in 1938, when he took advantage of the staging of a great international tournament in Holland to compare average and strong players with the world's leading grandmasters. One way he did so was to ask the players to describe their thoughts as they examined a position taken from a tournament game. He found that although experts--the class just below master--did analyze considerably more possibilities than the very weak players, there was little further increase in analysis as playing strength rose to the master and grandmaster levels. The better players did not examine more possibilities, only better ones--just as Capablanca had claimed.
Recent research has shown that de Groot's findings reflected in part the nature of his chosen test positions. A position in which extensive, accurate calculation is critical will allow the grandmasters to show their stuff, as it were, and they will then search more deeply along the branching tree of possible moves than the amateur can hope to do. So, too, experienced physicists may on occasion examine more possibilities than physics students do. Yet in both cases, the expert relies not so much on an intrinsically stronger power of analysis as on a store of structured knowledge. When confronted with a difficult position, a weaker player may calculate for half an hour, often looking many moves ahead, yet miss the right continuation, whereas a grandmaster sees the move immediately, without consciously analyzing anything at all.
De Groot also had his subjects examine a position for a limited period and then try to reconstruct it from memory. Performance at this task tracked game-playing strength all the way from novice to grandmaster. Beginners could not recall more than a very few details of the position, even after having examined it for 30 seconds, whereas grandmasters could usually get it perfectly, even if they had perused it for only a few seconds. This difference tracks a particular form of memory, specific to the kind of chess positions that commonly occur in play. The specific memory must be the result of training, because grandmasters do no better than others in general tests of memory.
Similar results have been demonstrated in bridge players (who can remember cards played in many games), computer programmers (who can reconstruct masses of computer code) and musicians (who can recall long snatches of music). Indeed, such a memory for the subject matter of a particular field is a standard test for the existence of expertise.
The conclusion that experts rely more on structured knowledge than on analysis is supported by a rare case study of an initially weak chess player, identified only by the initials D.H., who over the course of nine years rose to become one of Canada's leading masters by 1987. Neil Charness, professor of psychology at Florida State University, showed that despite the increase in the player's strength, he analyzed chess positions no more extensively than he had earlier, relying instead on a vastly improved knowledge of chess positions and associated strategies.
Chunking Theory In the 1960s Herbert A. Simon and William Chase, both at Carnegie Mellon University, tried to get a better understand-ing of expert memory by studying its limitations. Picking up where de Groot left off, they asked players of various strengths to reconstruct chess positions that had been artificially devised--that is, with the pieces placed randomly on the board--rather than reached as the result of master play. The correlation between game-playing strength and the accuracy of the players' recall was much weak-er with the random positions than with the authentic ones.
Chess memory was thus shown to be even more specific than it had seemed, being tuned not merely to the game itself but to typical chess positions. These experiments corroborated earlier studies that had demonstrated convincingly that ability in one area tends not to transfer to another. American psychologist Edward Thorndike first noted this lack of transference over a century ago, when he showed that the study of Latin, for instance, did not improve command of English and that geometric proofs do not teach the use of logic in daily life.
Simon explained the masters' relative weakness in reconstructing artificial chess positions with a model based on meaningful patterns called chunks. He invoked the concept to explain how chess masters can manipulate vast amounts of stored information, a task that would seem to strain the working memory. Psychologist George Miller of Princeton University famously estimated the limits of working memory--the scratch pad of the mind--in a 1956 paper entitled "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two." Miller showed that people can contemplate only five to nine items at a time. By packing hierarchies of information into chunks, Simon argued, chess masters could get around this limitation, because by using this method, they could access five to nine chunks rather than the same number of smaller details.
Take the sentence "Mary had a little lamb." The number of information chunks in this sentence depends on one's knowledge of the poem and the English language. For most native speakers of English, the sentence is part of a much larger chunk, the familiar poem. For someone who knows English but not the poem, the sentence is a single, self-contained chunk. For someone who has memorized the words but not their meaning, the sentence is five chunks, and it is 18 chunks for someone who knows the letters but not the words.
In the context of chess, the same differences can be seen between novices and grandmasters. To a beginner, a position with 20 chessmen on the board may contain far more than 20 chunks of information, because the pieces can be placed in so many configurations. A grandmaster, however, may see one part of the position as "fianchettoed bishop in the castled kingside," together with a "blockaded king's-Indian-style pawn chain," and thereby cram the entire position into perhaps five or six chunks. By measuring the time it takes to commit a new chunk to memory and the number of hours a player must study chess before reaching grandmaster strength, Simon estimated that a typical grandmaster has access to roughly 50,000 to 100,000 chunks of chess information. A grandmaster can retrieve any of these chunks from memory simply by looking at a chess position, in the same way that most native English speakers can recite the poem "Mary had a little lamb" after hearing just the first few words.
Even so, there were difficulties with chunking theory. It could not fully explain some aspects of memory, such as the ability of experts to perform their feats while being distracted (a favorite tactic in the study of memory). K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University and Charness argued that there must be some other mechanism that enables experts to employ long-term memory as if it, too, were a scratch pad. Says Ericsson: "The mere demonstration that highly skilled players can play at almost their normal strength under blindfold conditions is almost impossible for chunking theory to explain because you have to know the position, then you have to explore it in your memory." Such manipulation involves changing the stored chunks, at least in some ways, a task that may be likened to reciting "Mary had a little lamb" backward. It can be done, but not easily, and certainly not without many false starts and errors. Yet grandmaster games played quickly and under blindfold conditions tend to be of surprisingly high quality.
Ericsson also cites studies of physicians who clearly put information into long-term memory and take it out again in ways that enable them to make diagnoses. Perhaps Ericsson's most homely example, though, comes from reading. In a 1995 study he and Walter Kintsch of the University of Colorado found that interrupting highly proficient readers hardly slowed their reentry to a text; in the end, they lost only a few seconds. The researchers explained these findings by recourse to a structure they called long-term working memory, an almost oxymoronic coinage because it assigns to long-term memory the one thing that had always been defined as incompatible with it: thinking. But brain-imaging studies done in 2001 at the University of Konstanz in Germany provide support for the theory by showing that expert chess players activate long-term memory much more than novices do.
Fernand Gobet of Brunel University in London champions a rival theory, devised with Simon in the late 1990s. It extends the idea of chunks by invoking highly characteristic and very large patterns consisting of perhaps a dozen chess pieces. Such a template, as they call it, would have a number of slots into which the master could plug such variables as a pawn or a bishop. A template might exist, say, for the concept of "the isolated queen's-pawn position from the Nimzo-Indian Defense," and a master might change a slot by reclassifying it as the same position "minus the dark-squared bishops." To resort again to the poetic analogy, it would be a bit like memorizing a riff on "Mary had a little lamb" by substituting rhyming equivalents at certain slots, such as "Larry" for "Mary," "pool" for "school" and so on. Anyone who knows the original template should be able to fix the altered one in memory in a trice.
A Proliferation of Prodigies The one thing that all expertise theorists agree on is that it takes enormous effort to build these structures in the mind. Simon coined a psychological law of his own, the 10-year rule, which states that it takes approximately a decade of heavy labor to master any field. Even child prodigies, such as Gauss in mathematics, Mozart in music and Bobby Fischer in chess, must have made an equivalent effort, perhaps by starting earlier and working harder than others.
According to this view, the proliferation of chess prodigies in recent years merely reflects the advent of computer-based training methods that let children study far more master games and to play far more frequently against master-strength programs than their forerunners could typically manage. Fischer made a sensation when he achieved the grandmaster title at age 15, in 1958; today's record-holder, Sergey Karjakin of Ukraine, earned it at 12 years, seven months.
Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study," which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time. It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a player's progress; the main training value of such games is to point up weaknesses for future study.
Even the novice engages in effortful study at first, which is why beginners so often improve rapidly in playing golf, say, or in driving a car. But having reached an acceptable performance--for instance, keeping up with one's golf buddies or passing a driver's exam--most people relax. Their performance then becomes automatic and therefore impervious to further improvement. In contrast, experts-in-training keep the lid of their mind's box open all the time, so that they can inspect, criticize and augment its contents and thereby approach the standard set by leaders in their fields.
Meanwhile the standards denoting expertise grow ever more challenging. High school runners manage the four-minute mile; conservatory students play pieces once attempted only by virtuosi. Yet it is chess, again, that offers the most convincing comparison over time. John Nunn, a British mathematician who is also a grandmaster, recently used a computer to help him compare the errors committed in all the games in two international tournaments, one held in 1911, the other in 1993. The modern players played far more accurately. Nunn then examined all the games of one player in 1911 who scored in the middle of the pack and concluded that his rating today would be no better than 2100, hundreds of points below the grandmaster level--"and that was on a good day and with a following wind." The very best old-time masters were considerably stronger but still well below the level of today's leaders.
Then again, Capablanca and his contemporaries had neither computers nor game databases. They had to work things out for themselves, as did Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, and if they fall below today's masters in technique, they tower above them in creative power. The same comparison can be made between Newton and the typical newly minted Ph.D. in physics.
At this point, many skeptics will finally lose patience. Surely, they will say, it takes more to get to Carnegie Hall than practice, practice, practice. Yet this belief in the importance of innate talent, strongest perhaps among the experts themselves and their trainers, is strangely lacking in hard evidence to substantiate it. In 2002 Gobet conducted a study of British chess players ranging from amateurs to grandmasters and found no connection at all between their playing strengths and their visual-spatial abilities, as measured by shape-memory tests. Other researchers have found that the abilities of professional handicappers to predict the results of horse races did not correlate at all with their mathematical abilities.
Although nobody has yet been able to predict who will become a great expert in any field, a notable experiment has shown the possibility of deliberately creating one. L¿szl¿ Polg¿r, an educator in Hungary, homeschooled his three daughters in chess, assigning as much as six hours of work a day, producing one international master and two grandmasters--the strongest chess-playing siblings in history. The youngest Polg¿r, 30-year-old Judit, is now ranked 14th in the world.
The Polg¿r experiment proved two things: that grandmasters can be reared and that women can be grandmasters. It is no coincidence that the incidence of chess prodigies multiplied after L¿szl¿ Polg¿r published a book on chess education. The number of musical prodigies underwent a similar increase after Mozart's father did the equivalent two centuries earlier.
Thus, motivation appears to be a more important factor than innate ability in the development of expertise. It is no accident that in music, chess and sports--all domains in which expertise is defined by competitive performance rather than academic credentialing--professionalism has been emerging at ever younger ages, under the ministrations of increasingly dedicated parents and even extended families.
Furthermore, success builds on success, because each accomplishment can strengthen a child's motivation. A 1999 study of professional soccer players from several countries showed that they were much more likely than the general population to have been born at a time of year that would have dictated their enrollment in youth soccer leagues at ages older than the average. In their early years, these children would have enjoyed a substantial advantage in size and strength when playing soccer with their teammates. Because the larger, more agile children would get more opportunities to handle the ball, they would score more often, and their success at the game would motivate them to become even better.
Teachers in sports, music and other fields tend to believe that talent matters and that they know it when they see it. In fact, they appear to be confusing ability with precocity. There is usually no way to tell, from a recital alone, whether a young violinist's extraordinary performance stems from innate ability or from years of Suzuki-style training. Capablanca, regarded to this day as the greatest "natural" chess player, boasted that he never studied the game. In fact, he flunked out of Columbia University in part because he spent so much time playing chess. His famously quick apprehension was a product of all his training, not a substitute for it.
The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born. What is more, the demonstrated ability to turn a child quickly into an expert--in chess, music and a host of other subjects--sets a clear challenge before the schools. Can educators find ways to encourage students to engage in the kind of effortful study that will improve their reading and math skills? Roland G. Fryer, Jr., an economist at Harvard University, has experimented with offering monetary rewards to motivate students in underperforming schools in New York City and Dallas. In one ongoing program in New York, for example, teachers test the students every three weeks and award small amounts--on the order of $10 or $20--to those who score well. The early results have been promising. Instead of perpetually pondering the question, "Why can't Johnny read?" perhaps educators should ask, "Why should there be anything in the world he can't learn to do?"


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