The email shook me.

It rippled through the gaps in my knowledge. It made me question, not for the first time, whether this blindfold training worked at all.

It was maybe a year into running Don't Move. The email was from a member, let's call him Tom.

Tom said he'd discovered my work 6 months ago and it had resonated deeply with him. He felt it was the pathway out of his plateau.

He was so inspired by my work that he hadn't touched regular Chess in months. Instead, he had committed 100% to my methods. Every day, he worked on his blindfold skill. And he got very good at blindfold.

But he'd recently gone back to his regular Chess and, to his surprise, felt nothing. No increase in his clarity. No reduction in blunders.

It was like he'd wasted 6 months.

His email wasn't angry, it was simply inquisitive. He wanted to know where I thought he'd gone wrong.

I didn't know. The best I had were guesses.

By this point, I'd seen plenty of strong results from members on the website and people going through my various email series. I had my own results as a reference point as well. I'd never heard anything like Tom's experience.

The main difference stuck out to me instantly, that Tom hadn't touched his regular Chess in months. In every success story I'd heard, blindfold was a part of the training regimen, not the whole training regimen.

Even so, how could 6 months of blindfold training have no effect on Tom's regular Chess?

I would eventually find my answer in a 2011 paper by renowned cognitive psychologists, Elizabeth and Robert Bjork.

The Bjorks have poured a lot of work into the concept of 'desirable difficulties'. It brought to mind my own approach of Isolate and Intensify; taking part of a skill we're trying to learn, isolating it so we can focus on it, and practicing at a difficulty higher than we need to use in context.

But their work went deeper, validating much of my approach, but pushing it in directions I hadn't considered.

Their paper held the answer to Tom's predicament.

They wrote: "When instruction occurs under conditions that are constrained and predictable, learning tends to become contextualized." (emphasis mine)

In other words, if blindfold training is all we do, our brain will only apply those new skills within the context of blindfold work. They won't appear in our regular Chess.

This applies to every part of Chess, not just blindfold. Openings, tactics, whatever.

For example, many players get good at recalling their opening lines on Chessable but never remember them in their actual games. It's possible their brains have connected their opening knowledge with the specific Chessable experience rather than with Chess itself.

Whenever we learn some part of Chess in an isolated way, we need to tie it back to real games where it matters.

Tom didn't do that, because I never told him to. And his brain never learned that these awesome blindfold skills he'd developed could apply to his regular Chess. To his brain they were different contexts, and therefore different things.

The risk of this contextualization is perhaps higher with blindfold training than other kinds of Chess training. Because blindfold Chess and regular Chess aren't precisely the same thing.

They're very, very close. It's all the same information in both, and a large percentage of our Chess thinking happens semi-blindfold anyway, but the experience is just different enough that our brain can miss how one applies to the other.

We need to help it transfer those skills.

Thankfully, there's plenty of research on how we transfer the cognitive skills regarding working memory.

A 2019 meta-analysis of working memory training research by Giovanni Sala and colleagues found that transfer of cognitive skills between activities occurs when the activities are near enough to each other in "perceptual cues and solving strategies".

Working memory training across too-distant domains doesn't work. Getting better at blindfold Chess won't also make you better at remembering people's names at parties.

But working memory training within a particular domain does make the brain better at handling the cognitive demands of that domain.

As the authors put it, "Working memory training may simply make participants more able to perform a certain typology of task."

The cognitive work of full blindfold Chess and the semi-blindfold parts of regular Chess are certainly the same "typology of task". But the constrained nature of blindfold, the just-different-enough experience of it, means we need to help our brain see the links between them.

We do that by warming up with blindfold work, then jumping into regular Chess training or games.

The blindfold work gets the brain working, the mental muscles firing. Then we present our brain with the opportunity to use those muscles in the semi-blindfold work of actual Chess.

Not only does this approach help us link the skills together, it ends up being a far more optimized path to conceptualization improvement than blindfold training alone.

The first key lever Elizabeth and Robert Bjork identified to optimize skill acquisition is varying the conditions of our learning, especially the difficulty of our training activities.

They call upon a classic study by researchers Kerr and Booth from 1978 to illustrate the power of varying difficulties in our learning.

The researchers split a bunch of children into two groups and had them complete a ball-throwing exercise. Each child sat on a chair with a target on the floor in front of them.

They were allowed to see where the target was, but were then blindfolded before they attempted their throw.

They were given plenty of practice attempts to build some skill, then had a break, and returned to do the same task again as a test.

The twist is that Group A had their target placed at a fixed distance for every attempt. Group B's target was moved a different distance away before each throw. Critically, Group B were never given a target the same distance away as Group A's.

When they returned, all children were tested on their ability to hit the fixed distance Group A had been practicing with. Group B had never tried that exact distance at all.

Despite this, Group B far outperformed Group A. The children who had practiced the throw at varying distances, both easier and harder, were better at hitting that distance than the ones who had only practiced at that distance.

If we think of conceptualization like that, we could consider a game of Chess to be the fixed distance target. Then basic tactics puzzles and pattern recognition work could be the nearer, easier-to-hit targets. And our blindfold training the distant, harder-to-hit target.

The most effective results for our conceptualization come when we do all three. Work our conceptualization skills across the full range of difficulties.

If we only train blindfold, we only get good at blindfold. Our brain, like Tom's, hives that skill off and treats it as its own thing.

But if we train blindfold AND we play games AND we practice tactics or calculation, things connect and we pick up the skill faster while we're at it.

There's a lot more to say on the power of blindfold training for building greater awareness and strong habits in our regular Chess. We've got one more part in this series to dive into those.

But for now, simply start your Chess sessions with some blindfold work. Then jump straight into your other Chess training.

Stretch your conceptualization muscles at the higher difficulty first, then let your brain see how those muscles apply when the mental load is lighter. When the target is closer.

When training with my work, mix up the styles and difficulties of the exercises you choose. Every one of the 12 exercise styles we've designed across the membership and podcast will hit your conceptualization a little differently. Some are blindfold, some are not, and all will push your mental muscles to varying degrees. That variety will help you build flexible and enduring conceptualization skills.

When you train regular Chess, actively wield these mental muscles. Push yourself to "see" ahead with clarity. Rebuild puzzle positions from memory. Think about vacated squares and square control and piece relationships. Push to understand the position you can see as deeply as you when you really get a blindfold position.

That's how we ensure our brain links our blindfold skills to our regular game, and how we optimize our conceptualization training in the first place.

I have a lot to thank Tom for. His email, and the scare it gave me, triggered a bunch of research I may never have done otherwise. It continues to make my work better every day.

So, cheers, Tom. It's been a few years, I wonder if you know who you are.

Here's to the journey,
Aiden