Book completed: Peak Mind by Amishi P. Jha, PhD

    

I recently completed Peak Mind by Amishi P. Jha, PhD. For chess improvement purposes, this falls under the category of mental cross-training; you can see particularly relevant excerpts in Training quote of the day #56 and Training quote of the day #58.

The core message of the book is valuable and essentially boils down to what is on the cover: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day. For chessplayers at whatever level, there is no doubt about the benefits of increasing your ability to focus and to pay full attention to everything on the board in front of you. Mind-wandering is inevitable, as the book discusses at length in a scientific fashion, but the trick is to recognize what is going on and be able to re-channel your focus back to the present moment.

For the "12 minutes a day" part, this was the minimum effective dose (MED), determined by the author via experimentation, of mindfulness training that demonstrated a measurable positive difference in performance outcome in practitioners. She offers up a menu of three types of mental training and a suggested training plan. While this may well be an effective template, other types of mental training and mindfulness practices can also be as effective - this is not a new concept and various aspects of "mindfulness" have been touched on in previous posts. There is a reason various types of focused meditation have been integrated into martial arts practices - including modern military special forces training - for millennia: it gives the practitioner a mental edge in what Jha termed "periods of high demand", be that competition over the board, in an athletic event, or on a battlefield. The ability to calmly evaluate what is happening in real time, put aside both external and internal distractions, then effectively apply your skills and training to the situation is often the key to victory. This is in contrast to instinctually attempting to overcome a problem via the increasingly desperate application of raw strength (physical or mental), which is what fear and adrenaline do to us.

I have to say that for me the writing style falls firmly into the rather formulaic self-help category, and perhaps a majority of the book ends up being rather "fluffy", as I tend to put these things. That said, the core precepts are valid (and validated), and worth paying attention to.