I'll briefly mention that there was a study published which explores the effects that long-term study of Baduk/Go has on brain development.

"White matter neuroplastic changes in long-term trained players of the game of “Baduk”1 (GO): A voxel-based diffusion-tensor imaging study"
abstract

My summary: Go experts who participated in this study had "photographable" differences in specific areas of the brain. The Go experts were from the korean baduk association and had on average 12 years of intensive study.

Since I had managed to overlook this article for about half a year, I thought I would mention it in case anyone else might be interested.

Yeah, I've got a full copy of this study. It makes for quite an interesting read

I could not find the time to read all but one thing struck me: Estimated IQ of baduk experts is 93.
How is this possible?
People having mastered such a difficult mind game, have an average IQ of 93. Something must be wrong here.

_________________
If you say no, Elwood and I will come here for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of the week.

There is, but I suspect what's wrong is the IQ test's inability to test someone who has done nothing much other than Go from a young age.

I cannot give reference but I heard from different sources that chess grandmasters have a very high IQ on average. Why should it be different at Go?

Maybe because Go masters are from the far east where the visual thinking is culturally more dominant than analytical way of thinking. In the west this is the other way round. And since IQ tests are more oriented towards analytical thinking, this could explain it.
Of course I am just specualting. But this is a rather interesting issue.

_________________
If you say no, Elwood and I will come here for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of the week.

Is this so? (I have no idea). What aspects of asian cultures make this evident? Perhaps the pictorial element of the written word? I recall for example that the chinese character for "family" depicted a pig under a roof.

_________________
Patience, grasshopper.

Specifically what is meant by "visual thinking" and "analytical thinking"? Visual thinking I think I can figure out, but analytical thinking is not so clear.

Like the right-brain vs- left-brain issue. Analytical thinking requires analysis, i.e. dividing the problem into parts, solving each part separately and connecting the results.

Visual thinking requires seeing the whole picture.


For example:
Try to remember somebodies face analytically. He has brown eyes, short black hair, long nose, etc etc etc. You need tens of items like that and you are still far away from the real appearance of the face. But if you remember it visually, you just remember the whole face, that's it.




I have read it somewhere and made a lot of sense to me. It's also my subjective opinion but I cannot prove it. But discussing such issues, it is easy to fall into the trap of appearing "politically incorrect"

_________________
If you say no, Elwood and I will come here for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of the week.

IMO, asian think different.
we name abstract term and give name. (example: chi)
it is not proven but oriental medicine accept the term without proof.

i think go is a game were abstract thinking is necessary.
how do you define thinkness? how do you define aji?
how do you define flow? rhythm? hard to answer?

these are the terms that we know it is there but requires abstract thinking and hard to define.

yes i think chinese character has some effect on our thinking.
combination of 4 different character each with different meaning can be used to explain many different terms.
if you do not have too much experience in chinese character you wont even know what it mean by looking at individual definition. i guess we had alot of practice in abstract thinking with such practice.

_________________
"The more we think we know about
The greater the unknown"
Words by neil peart, music by geddy lee and alex lifeson

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

I don't see how that's an analytical approach at all. It's just a bunch of smaller visual memories. Analysis breaks something down to understand it on a fundamental level which is not happening here. Plus, how does this demonstrate how so-called visual thinking operates? According to this example it just magically solves the problem by producing the solution whole.

Perhaps you can use an example from an IQ test to demonstrate the difference (or some kind of problem). Trying to remember a face, whether in parts or in whole, doesn't involve actual thinking. Just recall.

In regards to Western vs. Eastern thinking, here is an article on the subject: http://www.livescience.com/2238-culture-fundamentally-alters-brain.html

_________________
"Those who calculate greatly will win; those who calculate only a little will lose, but what of those who don't make any calculations at all!? This is why everything must be calculated, in order to foresee victory and defeat."-The Art of War

You just explained it perfectly.

When I tell you Mr. X has brown eyes, this information is not visual. It becomes visual only when I show a picture of his eye.
But ok, that's a matter of definition. If you want to call it visual as soon as you see the word "brown", be my guest. Let's call it visual.
Even if we call it a bunch of smaller visual memories, it does break something down to understand it.

I don´t understand what is not clear about the example. Do you mean saying that he has brown eyes cannot be described as a part of analyzing his face?




It is not magic, it is a different part of human brain operating. You don't recognize peoples faces by recalling the eye color, the length of the nose etc. But if you want to describe a criminal to the police, you can use this analytical method if you don't have any visual information like a picture.




No I cannot, because I neither have an IQ test available, nor the time to look for an example that would satisfy you.
But recalling is actual thinking. If you want to see it as a question, put the question like "Is this a photo of Mr. X?".

_________________
If you say no, Elwood and I will come here for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of the week.

I hope this isn't going too off topic, but while it's not about the effects of go on the brain, it is about how the brain might affect go...

Here is another link regarding differences in western and asian thought. It is a pdf summary of the book The Geography of Thought by Richard Nesbitt. One of the points that the book makes is that one's culture influences the thought process.

Here is a quote from a description of the book that can be found here.



It seems to me plausible that viewing the world holistically and relationship-oriented might be advantageous to a go player.

_________________
Patience, grasshopper.

I do hope those people who have been beating some of us about the head with the need for precise rules, and telling us how stupid the Japanese are, are reading this with red faces and tingling ears.

Nothing to do with one mode of thought being better than the other, but I hope it is a salutary reminder that in international go we are dealing with people who can be noticeably different. Using either mode of thought, I would imagine that a sensible conclusion would be to respect the differences.

When you tell me Mr. X has brown eyes, the information is verbal. But what does verbal have to do with analytical? This is part of where you're losing me. If I recall a component part in my memory that I have seen, it is visual. If you convey a sentence to me describing it, the component is verbal. In both cases, being a smaller part of the whole (the face), though, you would consider it to be analytical. Furthermore, that is not the example you gave:



The implication is that this is distinct from anything visual. I just don't see how that's the case. Recalling part of what you have seen is just as visual as recalling the whole thing.

In your example the facial features are being recalled. Recalling the eyes of a face is visual. There was nothing mentioned about conveying information into sentences whatsoever. However, since shifting it to an issue of identification rather than recall makes more sense I'll just proceed with that in mind. It's certainly not how you presented it, though.



But you're only using the so-called analytical method because there is no singular word in the language used to designate this unique face unless the name of the individual is known to both you and the police ("It was Al Capone!"). This has nothing to do with analytical vs visual, it has only to do with the pragmatics of verbal communication.

I can just as easily argue that the process you're describing as "another part of the brain operating" is unconscious analytic thinking. The brain identifies a face to answer the question "Is this Al Capone?" by analytically cross-referencing known features since the actual photo you are going to see will be, as a whole, distinct in a number of ways from all your other visual impressions of Al Capone. Otherwise how would it be recognizable? The fact that this appears to happen as a magical form of "visual thinking" is simply a product of the processing being unconscious.

Then the counterpoint can be made that the same ought to apply even to the more fundamental components of the face which would require regress unless there is some basic capacity for recognition. The scale of whole to part is always going to be relative. This may be side-stepped if analytic processing relies on being able to generalize colors such as "brown" which is the opposite of breaking something down, but allows for recognition by creating a new 'whole' which decomposes into its constituent exemplars (or is that really how categories work? Maybe not). Where do such categories fit into the analytic/visual dynamic? Why is the opposition to the analytic visual anyway? Why not tactile, aural or olfactory?

I'm sorry, I just innately and violently resist the notion that 'thinking' is divisible into such handy-dandy discrete binary categories, especially when they supposedly align more-or-less neatly with geographical partitions of the globe. It's not really a big step beyond the idea that there is an "Intelligence" quotient expressible on a single quantitative scale.

EDIT: Edited to clarify a little. Also to post this link, which clarifies the problems with generalizing styles of thinking to Cultures like East and West better than I can (don't worry, despite the title containing the word "Orientalism" it's not really about that specifically):
http://neuroanthropology.net/2009/04/30 ... sychology/

Trivially: It's been said that East Asians do not really use eye colour (or hair colour) to describe a face (kinda understandably), as an example somewhere. I was under the impression that at least in (some?) Chinese, people have swathes of terms for eye shape - are they triangle-y? Phoenix shaped? This to me doesn't seem very different to noting the colour.

More trivially: The study initially linked suggests that spatial reckoning is the thing for go. I do not necessarily see that cultural holism and spatial reckoning faculty are closely related. I think it is not necessary at this point to look for further factors [as to why non-East-Asia has not equalled East-Asia in go professionals] than lack of popular interest and access in non-East-Asia. Razors and all that.

Edit: Realized something I said and bolded it.

_________________
Revisiting Go - Study Journal
My Programming Blog - About the evolution of my go bot.

Monadology,
I honestly don't understand what is bothering you so much about my face recognition example.

In a nutshell, what I am saying is: There are (at least) two different ways of thinking (or describing or remembering or...) somebodies face.
1-visualising it - I call this one visual thinking
2-analyzing it and recalling the details verbally (e.g. brown eyes) - I call this one analytical thinking

What exactly is it that you don't agree? Do you think they are the same way of thinking, or is there something else bothering you?

I am not a neuroscientist (maybe you are, I don't know) but I am just describing my view about different ways of thinking, which I see is in line with the passages cited by daal.

But if you are indeed a neuroscientist I will try to better understand what you are saying. Otherwise, I will probably not reply any further on this specific subject. Thanks

_________________
If you say no, Elwood and I will come here for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of the week.

One story is that aspiring go professionals are more likely to be excused from academic obligations than chess professionals. Someone more aware of the chess scene should probably confirm that, though.

_________________
Occupy Babel!