Article: How Your Brain Detects Patterns Without Conscious Thought

While pattern recognition's role in chess ability is (or should be) well-known, I still think it's somewhat under-emphasized in actual improvement programs. Perhaps that is because it often operates at an unconscious level ("System 1 thinking" or what we can also call "intuition"), rather than as part of our conscious ("System 2") calcuation process. This recent Scientific American article further illustrates the point of how learning actually does take place on an unconscious level:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-your-brain-detects-patterns-without-conscious-thought/

This may also affect our perceptions of "plateauing" at chess (or any other skill), since the phenomenon described in the article implies that our conscious "library" of patterns will grow more slowly than the unconscious one.

Specific to the role of intuition in chess, I think Carlsen's quote on his thinking process in "How Carlsen Makes Us Feel Better About Chess" is still very relevant.

Book completed: Trouble Is My Business

 

From the story "Red Wind" in Trouble Is My Business by Raymond Chandler:

We were almost at my door. I jammed the key in and shook the lock around and heaved the door inward. I reached in far enough to switch lights on. She went in past me like a wave. Sandalwood floated on the air, very faint.

I shut the door, threw my hat into a chair and watched her stroll over to a card table on which I had a chess problem set out that I couldn’t solve. Once inside, with the door locked, her panic had left her.

“So you’re a chess player,” she said, in that guarded tone, as if she had come to look at my etchings. I wished she had.