The ESPN article had a misleading title. They go on to say that a player burns 6000 calories a day , but Caruana runs an hour a day (or more). These Grandmasters are not reaching into some esoteric mental ability and burning more calories that way; if anyone has ever seen a Grandmaster play against many players at once, or blindfolded (or even blindfolded and against many players!) one can really understand that they see the board in a way that’s pretty different from us.
The classical theory for this is that they have formed bigger/better chunks than us from excessive playing (the very same way a Mathematician or a Basketball player does). Calorie consumption, is thus correlation in that specific context.
Although, I think, a (weak) connection could be made between the use of Language and these chunks formations or using this chunks (who’s to say this is not a specialized use of Language?) for the context of a tournament, but I have yet to see anything that support this idea.
My takeaway from the article was that, to your point, their brains weren’t using more energy. Rather, the best hypothesis was just that their adrenal hormones remained elevated for many hours of the day, leading to higher metabolism during that period. Running an hour a day is definitely not enough to burn 6000 calories for the record (a marathon burns around 3500).
Maybe I wasn’t clear, but that’s what I meant by the following.
The article’s claiming that chess players burn more energy purely from the side effects of stress, not because their brains are doing more work. So why am I revisiting this question?
Got it! then I agree with you. I think that a best description of my point would be that yeah, these guys are not burning calories by thinking better or harder. Their exercise plus the higher stress environment could account alone for their high amount burn of calories.
The ESPN article had a misleading title. They go on to say that a player burns 6000 calories a day , but Caruana runs an hour a day (or more). These Grandmasters are not reaching into some esoteric mental ability and burning more calories that way; if anyone has ever seen a Grandmaster play against many players at once, or blindfolded (or even blindfolded and against many players!) one can really understand that they see the board in a way that’s pretty different from us.
The classical theory for this is that they have formed bigger/better chunks than us from excessive playing (the very same way a Mathematician or a Basketball player does). Calorie consumption, is thus correlation in that specific context.
Although, I think, a (weak) connection could be made between the use of Language and these chunks formations or using this chunks (who’s to say this is not a specialized use of Language?) for the context of a tournament, but I have yet to see anything that support this idea.
My takeaway from the article was that, to your point, their brains weren’t using more energy. Rather, the best hypothesis was just that their adrenal hormones remained elevated for many hours of the day, leading to higher metabolism during that period. Running an hour a day is definitely not enough to burn 6000 calories for the record (a marathon burns around 3500).
Maybe I wasn’t clear, but that’s what I meant by the following.
Got it! then I agree with you. I think that a best description of my point would be that yeah, these guys are not burning calories by thinking better or harder. Their exercise plus the higher stress environment could account alone for their high amount burn of calories.