The Birmingham age-herald., 1920-06-20

London. May 1.-(Reciprocal News Serv-
 ice.)-The most highly developed human
 brain is storage house of moving pic-
 ture films. according to the results of the
 latest investigations by British and
 French psychologists. They have been
 aralyzng the mental processes of the
 great chess players of the world and find that no other theory will explain the
 feats of memory which they perform. You remember the old children's game of putting a number of articles on the table under the cloth. uncovering them for one minute and then everybody writ ing down list of as many articles as possible Psychologists took this up as a memory test and developed it into a character test and made lot of us feel uncomfortable about the small percent- ages we scored. That was in the days when memory was supposed to be a stor- pressions which had to be sorted out and put in order every time the memory was called upon. But today even the most complete and well-arranged stock of in- dividual memory photographs Is re- i! garded as quite a low order of mentality | Those who have that kind of a memory are just as much back numbers as the old magic lantern is compared with the | moving picture.
 When the. psychologists began to inves- tigate chess players minds, the old theory of photographic impressions be- gan to give way to the new one. Capa- blanca wandering around room with forty games laid out, could take instan- tapeous photographs of each table as he came to it and make hIs moves accord- ingly. The old theory was good enough for that But the feat of playing forty simultaneous games, extraordinary as it is. is not the most wonderful exhibition of chess virtuosity. In Paris this exhi btion has been outdone by Boris Kos itch He played ten simultaneous games.
 of which he won eight under the follow ing conditions: He was seated in chair with his face to a blank wall; each of his ten opponents announced consecutive
 ly each move made, and Kostitch, in
 turn, announced his: during four hours
 he kept these ten games going without
 seeing any board and without making any
 notes. This is not a new phenomenon in
 the chess world-others have played
 simultaneous games under similar condi-
 tions. One player is even said to have undertaken sixteen simultaneous games
 of this kind. although the results are not published. But it seems that the mental
 process of playing simultaneous games
 blindfolded is different from that of play
 ing simultaneous games which are visi-
 ble.
 The French psychologist. Alfred Binet
 of the Sorbonne. began the investigation
 of these mental phenomena some years
 ago. From his investigations and those
 os others there came at first theory
 that such extraordinary faculties of the
 mind could not be accounted for by what
 has been called visual memory. It seemed impossible that mind which conducted ten chess games at a time could make
 mental photogra phs of the ten boards as
 seen in the minds eve after every move
 and keap those photographs properly sorted and available in rapid succession.
 one after the other. for consultation as
 each new move had to be made. It was
 even qdestioned whether such player
 ever visualized the board at all. but did not rather follow some preconceived plan