I have always been fascinated by the way amateurs (of all nations but westerners seem especially prone) are obsessed with invading. Without thinking about it deeply I have just assumed it was all about the nether regions, though an impish voice in my head did try to remind that women have a reputation for very aggressive go. But that's a reputation I've never quite agreed with, largely because women don't seem to invade so much.
I take my own theories with a pinch of salt because I belong to a generation when boys were not allowed to study biology. For me that's always created a barrier to medical sciences of body and mind in general. But I was in a bookshop yesterday and browsed through the bestseller collection. Thumbing though a scientific book on story-telling, I came across the following paragraph:
Quote:
Humans have a compulsion to make things happen in their environment that's so powerful it's described by psychologists as 'almost as basic a need as food an water.' When researchers put people in flotation tanks and block their eyes and ears they found that, often within seconds, they'll start rubbing their fingers together or making ripples in the water. After four hours some are singing 'bawdy songs'. Another study found 67 per cent of male participants and 25 per cent of female participants so desperate to make things happen in a room that was empty of stimulus, except for an electric shock machine, that they started giving themselves painful shocks.
I decided at once that that was a better theory to fit invasion-its than mine. It squares better with my observations on female play. What do you think?
The next paragraph in the book surprised me even more. It related an experiment in which two groups were asked to read a long passage. One group were told nothing about the passage and ended up unable to recall more than a handful of sentences. The other group was told that the passage concerned the washing of clothes. "The simple addition of a human goal transformed the gobbledegook into something clear. They remembered twice as much."
I think that insight could have a huge impact on go study, and none of it necessarily anything to do with memorisation. For example, practising reading. Just trying to read deeper and deeper is really only adding the 'degook' to 'gobble'. But if you add a goal, you can gobble your way straight through the problem. That trains your brain far more efficiently. So the goal is to define a goal. Well, many problems books come with hints, but many amateurs scorn them for that reason (is this testosterone at work?). But one pro's hint could be another amateur's goal. Do lots of such problems and you efficiently train your goal-making neurons as well as your look-ahead. Or not?
Anyway, I was impressed enough to buy the book and read enough before I fell asleep last night to agree with at least some of the comments in the blurb (e.g. Brilliant, accessible and very human. A stupendous achievement). It is "The Science of Storytelling" by Will Storr.
It does not, however, seem to tell us why people immersed in tanks end up singing bawdy songs. Maybe there really is testosterone in the water? But them why wait four hours? A fascinating area.