Chess and Health

In recent decades there is a boom in the publication of scientific studies and doctoral theses on the contribution of chess in different areas of human life: educational, social and therapeutic. The results of the different studies usually lead to similar conclusions: chess is a cognitive and emotional training that intervenes in the improvement of planning organization, problem solving attention, viso-spatial capacity, memory, emotional intelligence, among others.

Thanks to the advance of science and technology, instruments are being developed that allow us to study both the architecture and the functioning of the human brain, and in our case, it gives us the possibility of knowing the chess brain. I like to higlight the different studies published in the last decade by psychologists and scientific critics Bilalic, M. and Gobet, F. which they conclude how the brain of a chess player works differently from the non-player: 

For example, they checked how the chess players had greater activation of the lower left area of the parietal lobe, the medial para-hippocampal cortex and the fusiform area. The different investigations carried out by the group of Campitelli, G. concluded that playing chess produces a bilateral activation of the cingulum, cerebellum and frontal lobe.