段落A

Next month, a chess player named Timur Gareyev will take on nearly 50 opponents at once. But that is not the hard part. While his challengers will play the games as normal, Gareyev himself will be blindfolded. Even by world record standards, it sets a high bar for human performance. The 28-year-old already stands out in the rarefied world of blindfold chess. He has a fondness for bright clothes and unusual hairstyles, and he gets his kicks from the adventure sport of BASE jumping. He has already proved himself a strong chess player, too. In a 10-hour chess marathon in 2013, Gareyev played 33 games in his head simultaneously. He won 29 and lost none. The skill has become his brand: he calls himself the Blindfold King.

段落B

But Gareyev’s prowess has drawn interest from beyond the chess-playing community. In the hope of understanding how he and others like him can perform such mental feats, researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) called him in for tests. They now have their first results. ‘The ability to play a game of chess with your eyes closed is not a far reach for most accomplished players,’ said Jesse Rissman, who runs a memory lab at UCLA. ‘But the thing that’s so remarkable about Timur and a few other individuals is the number of games they can keep active at once. To me it is simply astonishing.’

段落C

Gareyev learned to play chess in his native Uzbekistan when he was six years old. Tutored by his grandfather, he entered his first tournament aged eight and soon became obsessed with competitions. At 16, he was crowned Asia’s youngest ever chess grandmaster. He moved to the US soon after, and as a student helped his university win its first national chess championship. In 2013, Gareyev was ranked the third best chess player in the US.

段落D

To the uninitiated, blindfold chess seems to call for superhuman skill. But displays of the feat go back centuries. The first recorded game in Europe was played in 13th-century Florence. In 1947, the Argentinian grandmaster Miguel Najdorf played 45 simultaneous games in his mind, winning 39 in the 24-hour session.

段落E

Accomplished players can develop the skill of playing blind even without realising The nature of the game is to run through possible moves in the mind to see how they play out. From this, regular players develop a memory for the patterns the pieces make, the defences and attacks. ‘You recreate it in your mind,’ said Gareyev. ‘A lot of players are capable of doing what I’m doing.’ The real mental challenge comes from playing multiple games at once in the head. Not only must the positions of each piece on every board be memorised, they must be recalled faithfully when needed, updated with each player’s moves, and then reliably stored again,so the brain can move on to the next board. First moves can be tough to remember because they are fairly uninteresting. But the ends of games are taxing too, as exhaustion sets in. When Gareyev is tired, his recall can get patchy. He sometimes makes moves based on only a fragmented memory of the pieces’ positions.

段落F

The scientists first had Gareyev perform some standard memory tests. These assessed his ability to hold numbers, pictures and words in mind. One classic test measures how many numbers a person can repeat, both forwards and backwards, soon after hearing them. Most people manage about seven. ‘He was not exceptional on any of these standard tests,’ said Rissman. ‘We didn’t find anything other than playing chess that he seems to be supremely gifted at.’ But next came the brain scans. With Gareyev lying down in the machine, Rissman looked at how well connected the various regions of the chess player’s brain were. Though the results are tentative and as yet unpublished, the scans found much greater than average communication between parts of Gareyev’s brain that make up what is called the frontoparietal control network. Of 63 people scanned alongside the chess player, only one or two scored more highly on the measure. ‘You use this network in almost any complex task. It helps you to allocate attention, keep rules in mind, and work out whether you should be responding or not,’ said Rissman.

段落G

It was not the only hint of something special in Gareyev’s brain. The scans also suggest that Gareyev’s visual network is more highly connected to other brain parts than usual. Initial results suggest that the areas of his brain that process visual images – such as chess boards – may have stronger links to other brain regions, and so be more powerful than normal. While the analyses are not finalised yet, they may hold the first clues to Gareyev’s extraordinary ability.

段落H

For the world record attempt, Gareyev hopes to play 47 blindfold games at once in about 16 hours. He will need to win 80% to claim the title. ‘I don’t worry too much about the winning percentage, that’s never been an issue for me,’ he said. ‘The most important part of blindfold chess for me is that I have found the one thing that I can fully dedicate myself to. I miss having an obsession.’

下个月，一位名叫Timur Gareyev的国际象棋选手将同时挑战将近50名对手。但这并不是最困难的部分。虽然他的对手将按照正常规则下棋，但Gareyev自己将戴上眼罩。即使按照世界纪录标准来看，这也是对人类表现极高要求的一次挑战。这位28岁的选手已经在盲棋的高层世界中脱颖而出。他喜欢鲜艳的衣服和不寻常的发型，还热衷于极限运动基地跳伞。他已经证明了自己是一位强大的国际象棋选手。在2013年的一次10小时国际象棋马拉松中，Gareyev同时在脑海中进行了33场比赛。他赢了29场，没有输过。这项技能已经成为他的品牌：他称自己为“盲棋之王”。

但是，Gareyev的才华引起了除国际象棋界以外的人们的兴趣。为了希望了解他和其他类似人如何能够完成这种心理壮举，加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校（UCLA）的研究人员邀请他进行测试。他们现在已经有了第一批结果对于大多数有成就的选手来说，闭着眼睛下国际象棋并不难实现，”在UCLA的记忆实验室负责的Jesse Rissman说道。“但是，Timur和其他几个人之所以如此引人注目，是因为他们能够同时进行多场比赛。在我看来，这真是令人惊叹。”

Gareyev六岁时在他的祖国乌兹别克斯坦学会了下国际象棋。在祖父的指导下，他八岁时参加了他的第一场比赛，并很快对比赛产生了痴迷。16岁时，他成为亚洲最年轻的国际象棋特级大师。之后不久，他移居美国，并在作为学生的同时帮助他的大学赢得了第一个全国国际象棋冠军。2013年，Gareyev在美国被评为第三名最佳国际象棋选手。

对于外行人来说，盲棋似乎需要超人的技能。但是这项壮举的展示已经有几个世纪的历史了。欧洲第一场记录下来的盲棋比赛是在13世纪的佛罗伦萨进行的。1947年，阿根廷国际象棋特级大师Miguel Najdorf在心中同时进行了45场比赛，在为期24小时的比赛中赢得了39场。

有经验的选手即使在不知不觉中也可以发展出盲棋的技巧。游戏的本质是通过脑海中的可能走法来推演走棋情况。从中，常规选手会对棋子的走位、防守和进攻模式进行记忆。“你在脑海中重现它，”Gareyev说。“很多选手都有能力做到我在做的事情。”真正的心理挑战来自于同时在脑海中进行多场比赛。不仅必须记住每个棋盘上每一颗棋子的位置，还必须在需要时可靠地回忆起来，随着每个选手的走法进行更新，然后可靠地存储，以便大脑可以转向下一个棋盘。初始的走法可能很难记住，因为它们相当无聊。但是游戏的结束也很困难，因为会感到疲惫。当Gareyev疲倦时，他的回忆力会变得不稳定。他有时会根据对棋子位置的碎片记忆来走棋。

科学家们首先让Gareyev进行了一些标准的记忆测试。这些测试评估了他记住数字、图片和单词的能力。其中一个经典的测试是测量一个人在听到数字后能够重复多少个数字，无论是正向还是反向。大多数人可以记住大约七个数字。“他在任何标准测试中都没有表现出超凡的能力，”Rissman说。“除了下国际象棋之外，我们没有发现他在其他方面特别擅长。”但接下来是脑部扫描。Gareyev躺在机器里，Rissman观察了这位国际象棋选手的各个脑区之间的连接情况。尽管结果还不确定，且尚未发表，但扫描结果发现Gareyev的脑部的前顶叶控制网络的各个部分之间的通信要比普通人更多。在与这位国际象棋选手一起接受扫描的63人中，只有一两个人在这个指标上得分更高。“你在几乎任何复杂任务中都会使用这个网络。它帮助你分配注意力，记住规则，并判断你是否应该做出回应，”Rissman说。

这并不是Gareyev的大脑中特殊能力的唯一暗示。扫描结果还表明，Gareyev的视觉网络与其他脑区相比连接更紧密。初步结果表明，他的大脑中处理视觉图像（如国际象棋棋盘）的区域可能与其他脑区之间的联系更为强大，因此更加强大。尽管分析尚未完成，但它们可能是解开Gareyev非凡能力之谜的第一批线索。

对于世界纪录尝试，Gareyev希望在大约16个小时内同时下47场盲棋。他需要赢得80%的比赛才能获得这一称号。“我并不太担心获胜率，这对我来说从来都不是问题，”他说。“对我来说，盲棋最重要的部分是我找到了我能够全身心投入的事情。我怀念拥有一个痴迷的感觉。”