Our brains are the most powerful computers on Earth, but they're restricted by the amount of things they can do at one time.

And the game of Chess pushes that limit mercilessly.

Our brains need to keep track of all the ideas and dynamics in a position, come up with plans, recognize our opponents' plans, calculate and remember sequences of moves, control our emotions, keep track of our clock situation, remember our theory, recognize patterns, ignore many of the patterns we recognize…

That's a lot of stuff. And we often need to do it all at once. Our limited brain resources struggle under the weight.

As a quick recap, psychologists estimate that we can hold around 7 pieces of information in our mind at one time. 7 slots for 7 chunks of data.

It's not just information that goes into these slots. We also use them for thinking, planning, emotional processing, and pretty much everything in that list above. Only 7 slots to support everything our brains need to do during a Chess game.

One of the key things our 7 slots handles is our self-control.

When you see a cookie on the plate and you know you shouldn't eat it – but you really want to – you need to use one of your 7 slots to resist the temptation.

When we're playing Chess, our intuition's suggestions act like that cookie on the plate. They're insistent, loud, distracting, and probably not that good for us.

When we have plenty of slots vacant, it's easier to resist the temptation. We can hear what our intuition is saying, review it, and decide what we want to do. We're in control.

But 7 slots isn't all that many. And they fill up fast. When they're full, it's very difficult to stop intuition from taking over.

Like a bike charging down a hill with no pedals and no brakes, we find ourselves out of control. Intuition makes suggestions, and we're helpless to resist.

I call this "Freewheeling".

It's that experience where an idea jumps out at you in the position and you find yourself playing the move without thinking. After you play it, you feel your brain switch back on – just in time to watch your opponent punish your blunder. "What was I thinking?!" You berate yourself.

The truthful answer is that you weren't thinking. Not really.

You needed one of your 7 slots to challenge your intuition, and you didn't have one available. So your intuition took over.

You weren't in conscious control of any of it. Your brain did it by itself. You freewheeled.

Our intuition gains too much control when our 7 slots are strained. So it's critical that we teach our brains to be efficient with how they handle the slots. To have as many available for use as possible at any one time.

The better our brain handles our 7 slots, the less likely we are to run out of them in critical moments.

There are 3 approaches we can take to do that: health, emotions, and efficiency. As always, I recommend all 3.

Health: Ensure you're rested, eating well, and exercising for maximum brain performance.

Since Chess is entirely a mental game (except maybe blitz and bullet where mouse/hand speed play a role), we're going to play better if our brain has what it needs to perform well.

When we're tired, eating badly, or haven't exercised in a while, our brains start to slow down. They activate a kind of low power mode, prioritizing the functions that would help us survive if needed, and drop everything else.

Our brains prioritize intuition, which would help us escape a tiger, and restrict our deeper thinking, which is too slow to help in a tiger situation. That's a recipe for Chess disaster.

Rest well, eat well, and exercise. If you're not giving your brain the things it needs, it won't give you what you need during your games.

Emotions: Keep a level head.

Emotions take slots to process. When strong emotions arise during games, positive or negative, our brains will divert some of our 7 slots to handle it. Too much emotion will reduce your ability to control your intuition.

When you sense emotions taking over, switch to talking to yourself in the third person. Stop saying "I" in your head.

It sounds weird, but studies have shown this simple change has the same effect on emotional regulation in just 1 second as 15 minutes of journalling. And it's much harder to fit 15 minutes of journalling into the middle of a blitz game.

When you speak to yourself in the third person, you're more likely to be kind, as if speaking to a friend. And it helps your brain to avoid identifying with the emotion and spiralling further. It's a great hack for your wider life as well.

Efficiency: Train your brain to handle Chess information with less effort and fewer slots.

There's so much happening in a standard Chess position that our brains struggle to keep track of it all at once. Our 7 slots strain with the complexity. Since we're using so many slots just handling what's happening in the position, we're left without much space for anything else.

We need to train our brains to be comfortable with all that information. To track it efficiently, and leave room for all the other Chess brain functions. That is the essence of conceptualization training.

If you haven't already, I encourage you to try the Chess Visualization with Aiden Rayner podcast (Apple | Spotify). We release 5 episodes every week, including 3 training exercises and 2 lessons. It's a great place to start your conceptualization work.

(And if you're serious about training your mental Chess muscles, I encourage you to join us with a Don't Move Membership.)

Now we've looked at how you can improve your intuition's suggestions and how to maximize your chance of stopping intuition from taking over.

But regardless how good you are at those things, the odd horrible intuition-driven mistake will slip through. It's inevitable. It even happens at the top level.

So we need to build a last line of defence, something that will help you catch these errors just before you make them. A safety net, if you will.

We'll chat about that in the sixth and final part of the Intuition series.

Here's to the journey,
Aiden