De Groot noted that over time the schemas can become deeply ‘engrained in the player’, meaning that the right solution may come to mind automatically with just a mere glance at the board, which neatly accounts for those phenomenal flashes of brilliance that we have come to associate with expert intuition. Automatic, engrained behaviours also free up more of the brain’s working memory, which might explain how experts operate in challenging environments. ‘If this were not the case,’ de Groot later wrote, ‘it would be completely impossible to explain why some chess players can still play
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