Decision time: when science tells us to resist our initial hunch

Carl Sagan once noted that the best antidote to pseudoscience is real science, and it’s certainly a fact that the findings of robust scientific studies can be far more shocking and difficult to believe than those that have undeservedly received a mainstream ‘common sense’ welcome. I have written previously about one prominent neuromyth – that of ‘learning styles’ – but I’ve recently been prompted to reflect in more detail on the moment that every chessplayer experiences with every move they make – that moment when our neurons shift from a period of invisible and infinitely reflexive discussion (however brief or lengthy) to the decisive and irreversible instruction to one of our limbs actually to take hold of a piece and move it to a new square. (We’ll ignore for now those embarrassingly betwixt-and-between episodes of hand-hovering or reach-and-withdraw, which reveal too much about either our state of mental confusion or our tendency towards egregious gamesmanship.) How reliable is that instinct? What drives that moment, whether it’s a quixotic impulse or, channelling W.B. Yeats, that more lumbering cousin: that rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born? Is that moment founded on a rational process, or is it affected by a pseudoscientific belief that in reality might be doing more harm to our game than good? And if it’s the latter, can we eliminate it from our repertoire of chessplaying habits?