WIXLIB

personwitnesses a professional play Starcraft 2, they seem to think that this person is juggling an infinitenumber of things in their head at the same time.The problem with this view is that it is wrong! While people can indeed multi-task better with practice,they never actually are able to "multi-task" but rather switch back and forth between the two tasks at afaster rate (Moran, 2009).True multi-tasking results in incredible performance decrements and is a terribly inefficient use of brainresources. Consider the Prefrontal Cortex itself, marked in blue on the picture of the brain below:From the model above, you can see that the prefrontal cortex itself takes up very little space on thebrain. In fact, this part of the brain occupies less than 5% of the total volume of the brain. While theprefrontal cortex is powerful, it is small. Its primary job seems to be to coordinate the data supplied byother parts of the brain. As the brain thinks itself through a problem, the prefrontal cortex sends out thework to the other parts of the brain, synthesizes it, and comes up with a solution.The problem is that the prefrontal cortex actually only seems to be handle a few tasks at once, with 1task resulting in optimal performance.Research into multi-tasking has revealed the existence of something called dual task interference, whichis the idea that any task which relies on the same regions of the brain cannot be executed at the sametime at optimal performance. Dual task interference has been thoroughly researched by scientist HaroldPashler (Pashler, 1994).Among the highlights of Pashler and other researchers was the discovery that our ability to multi-task ismore limited than most people could have imagined. When asked to solve cognitive puzzles, adults arewww.osirismethod.com – Home of The Osiris Methodwww.osirissc2guide.com – Free Starcraft 2 strategies and guide8

much faster than the average 3rd grader. However, when those same adults have to perform a secondbasic task, such as adding or subtracting whole numbers, the adults fare no better at those cognitivetasks than the children. In short, trying to do even two simple things at once significantly reduces brainpower.Fortunately, with practice, the prefrontal cortex can become much faster at processing information(Moran, 2009). We will cover that more in a later section.Dual Task Interference and Starcraft 2Most players try to play their way through Starcraft 2 while trying to multi-task. They consciously andactively switch their attention between in-game tasks, such as controlling units, training reinforcements,building more workers, researching new technology, and scouting. As researchers have demonstrated,this constant change in attention ultimately results in significant performance decrements.I am sure everyone that has played Starcraft 2 has experienced dual task interference, often many timesin a single game. Think about the panic that sets in when you are in the middle of a major battle and theother player slips a drop into one of your expansions. Are you able to react? Even professional levelplayers can take losses in such a situation, either diverting attention away from the main battle andlosing the benefit of good micro, or by not paying attention to the drop and letting it do major havocinside their base before finally cleaning it up. Lesser players frequently just freeze up entirely, oftenlosing their main army or even the game in the process. At a bare minimum, production will be haltedentirely in response to such a dual-pronged attack.Imagine how much easier Starcraft 2 would be if you only ever had to focus on one thing at a time. Howmuch better would your micro and tactics be if you only had to look at your units, and your baseautomatically built itself, trained reinforcements, expanded, and built new workers? You would likely beunstoppable, as controlling your units is much easier when you can place your full attention on them!Strange as that sounds, this is how professional players actually play Starcraft 2. They are able to pushoff much of the raw mental processes involved with playing into other parts of their brains, so that theprefrontal cortex is free to put its attention to the more fluid aspects of the game, such as micro,reconnaissance, harass, and predicting the enemy’s strategy.In the following sections, you are going to discover how to achieve this shift in brain activity for yourselfand how to disrupt it in others. This is what is required to become an elite Starcraft 2 player.www.osirismethod.com – Home of The Osiris Methodwww.osirissc2guide.com – Free Starcraft 2 strategies and guide9

Working Memory and Starcraft 2 - Conquering Your LimitationsWorking memory, or short-term memory, is the amount of information or ideas that you can hold at theforefront of your brain for a very limited period of time. Since the prefrontal cortex discussed earlier isat the seat of your attention, you can think of your working memory as the amount of different thingsyour prefrontal cortex can access quickly. While your prefrontal cortex can only truly focus on one itemat a time, it can switch between items in the working memory at a very rapid rate, without actuallyhaving to stop and "think about it".To use a computer analogy, working memory is like the RAM of the computer, whereas long-termmemory is the hard drive. In this analogy, the eyes of the user are like the prefrontal cortex. A computercan store thousands of programs in its hard drive (long term memory) and is able to open severalprograms at once (working memory). The eyes of the user (prefrontal cortex) can only look at oneprogram at once, but can quickly tab between programs.Working memory is extremely limited. In one of the most popular experiments, working memory in theaverage adult was determined to be 7 items long. This is why phone numbers were originally only 7digits: it was thought that was what a person could easily remember without a lot of practice.However, while this is true for numbers, the amount of items you can store in working memorydecreases as the items you are focusing on increase in complexity. On the other hand, the amount ofitems you can store in working memory increases with increasing familiarity.Chunking - The Key to Superior Mental PerformanceImagine trying to remember this sentence: "Zerg players think SkyToss and the Immortal Sentry All-In isoverpowered." If you play Starcraft 2, such a sentence would take no effort at all to memorize, as theseconcepts are familiar to you already. Give that same sentence to someone who has never playedStarcraft 2 before and it would take them a very long time to memorize all the words and their properspellings.Why are Starcraft 2 players able to recall such a sentence easier than regular people? Do Starcraft 2players simply have superior working memory? Of course not. The reason they can remember what thesentence says is due to the neural process known as chunking. A chunk refers to a collection of smallerbits of information that are stored in the brain together. In this example, the "chunks" are the words,and the individual letters are the components of that chunk.When we go back to that sentence a few paragraphs back, when a Starcraft 2 player was presented withthe earlier sentence, the word "SkyToss" and "Zerg" are chunks of the letters S, K, Y, T, O, S, S and Z, E, R,and G. The sentence is much easier for a Starcraft 2 player to remember, as they already have a clearidea of what SkyToss is and what Zerg represents. Each word only takes up 1 unit of working memory,www.osirismethod.com – Home of The Osiris Methodwww.osirissc2guide.com – Free Starcraft 2 strategies and guide10

whereas a regular person would need to dedicate an entire unit of memory to each letter in unfamiliarwords if they hope to remember the spelling!More advanced Starcraft 2 players would chunk the sentence even further. "Immortal Sentry All In" is aphrase that any top-level Wings of Liberty player (or dedicated spectator) would recognize. This entireconcept is one chunk and one unit of information. If you hung out on forums or fought against thiscombination before, you might even think that the "Immortal Sentry All-In" was indeed overpowered inWings of Liberty, and you could chunk "the Immortal Sentry All-In is overpowered" all into one unit ofinformation. Through chunking, the amount of information a person can handle increases significantly.What does this have to do with competitive gaming and Starcraft 2 in particular? It turns out thatchunking is what allows professional players of mind-based games to be elite at those particular games.More specifically, research into grandmaster chess players has revealed that players do not derive theirskill from working memory that can be applied to memorizing anything. In fact, their working memoriesare not superior to that of the average person. Pros are not simply geniuses that have working memorybeyond that of the average player. Instead the professionals become more skillful due to patternrecognition and the neural process known as chunking.There have been a multitude of studies which have demonstrated the improved chunking ability ofexpert chess players over regular players. Perhaps the most famous experiment was that of Chase andSimon in 1973. In this study, expert chess players and beginners were shown chess boards with thepieces spread on the board for a limited time. They were then asked to recall the places that the pieceswere found at on the board.The results were very interesting: when shown chess boards where the pieces were commonarrangements for top-level play, experts were able to remember the entire board piece by piece,whereas beginners were only able to remember a handful of pieces. However, when the chess pieceswere not real-game positions but rather randomly placed on the board, experts were no better thanbeginners at recalling the pieces (Chase & Simon, 1973)! This is hard evidence that top-level chessplayers do not have better working memories than beginners, but rather that they have condensed thechess positions into single pieces (or chunks) of information. Beginners on the other hand could notremember much at all because each individual chess piece and the position of that piece was a unit ofinformation.Let’s reimagine the experiment in Starcraft 2 terms. Imagine a standard base layout of the popularProtoss opening build, the “Forge Fast Expand”, was shown to both professional Protoss players as wellas relatively new Starcraft 2 players. Players were allowed to look at the base layout for 10 seconds, andthen asked to recreate the build from memory. The professional players would likely be able to naildown the positions of all the buildings down to the exact spot, whereas the non-pros would only be ableto remember the placement of a few buildings.Next in our theoretical experiment, those same pros and newbies alike were shown a Protoss baselayout using structures that made absolutely no sense and would never be used in a real game. Whenwww.osirismethod.com – Home of The Osiris Methodwww.osirissc2guide.com – Free Starcraft 2 strategies and guide11

asked to recreate such structure placement and alignment, pros would fare no better than newbies. Thisis the power of chunking.Further research shows that the higher the skill level in chess, the more complex the chunks ofinformation become. Grandmaster chess players do not actually consciously calculate their actions fiftyindividual moves into the future as sensational journalists like to report but instead have developedlarge chunks, where the position of the pieces on the board may represent a single chunk ofinformation, and the possible enemy moves are boiled down to a few chunks which consist of theknown viable strategies at that point of the game.In essence, grandmaster chess players have created huge numbers of chunks which represent thevariety of strategies and moves used in chess. They have played so many games of chess so many timesthat they have stored these chunks are stored in their long-term memory. When the grandmaster sees aparticular layout of pieces on the board, they already know what their viable options are. Often theseoptions are chunked into many moves because their opponent also knows what the viable options areand what the viable counters are. This is all specific to the current way the pieces are laid out on theboard. Grandmaster chess players are not actually actively coming up with strategies during the game,but rather pulling from their long term memory. These strategy “chunks” that are relevant to thespecific game they are playing are pulled into the working memory. By this process, the prefrontalcortex has narrowed down thousands of possible moves into a handful of chunks that it can easilymanipulate to calculate the best move.www.osirismethod.com – Home of The Osiris Methodwww.osirissc2guide.com – Free Starcraft 2 strategies and guide12

Chunking and Starcraft 2 PerformanceJust like with chess players, elite Starcraft 2 players are able to synthesize large amounts of in-gameinformation into a single chunk, freeing up valuable brain resources to focus on other more dynamicparts of the brain.By now, I hope light bulbs are going off in your head. You now know that the primary decision-makingpart of your brain, the pre-frontal cortex, can only hold a few items in its working memory at a time andit can only truly pay attention to a single one of those items at once. You also know that large amountsof information can be condensed into chunks, and that top-tier chess players can condense an entireboard worth of pieces into a few (or less) chunks.With this information in hand, it should be clear that in order to become expert Starcraft 2 players, wemust come up with strategies and tactics to condense the large number of variables in Starcraft 2 gamesinto chunks that are much more manageable to the prefrontal cortex.In the next section, we will discuss how chunks are created by the brain. By understanding how to createchunks, we can begin deconstructing large and complicated Starcraft 2 concepts into simple chunks thatcan be more easily handled by the prefrontal cortex.Patterns and Chunking - How to Create ChunksNow that you know that creating chunks is the key to performing at the highest level, the next logicalstep is to learn how to create chunks. This process is actually automatic: chunks will naturally begin toform with several rounds of exposure to a particular pattern. All you have to do is repeat whatever it isyou are learning over and over again. However, there are a few caveats: the simpler the task, the fasteryou will learn it; the more attention you pay to what you are doing, the faster you will learn it; and themore consistent each repetition is, the easier it is to learn.Simplifying the ChunkIn the next section, we are going to chunk sections of Starcraft 2 into practicable sections. Thesesections need to be simple. This does not necessarily mean not complicated but rather means that weshould practice small parts at a time.For example, imagine you want to master a new build order that is very economically aggressive andrelies on harassment techniques to keep an enemy pinned down while you aggressively expand. Ratherthan try to practice the entire thing together, you could break the build down into the macro part andthe micro part separately. First, practice the build against a computer, just focusing on the macro(building things, training harvesters, etc.), training the units required but not actually attacking. Oncewww.osirismethod.com – Home of The Osiris Methodwww.osirissc2guide.com – Free Starcraft 2 strategies and guide13

that is perfected, you could practice the harassment without actually worrying about keeping up withthe macro.Once both of these aspects are perfected, they could be combined much more easily.Do not worry about exactly how to go about memorizing a build just now – we will go into that in thepractice section.Paying AttentionDuring practice sessions, the more attention you can pay, the faster you will learn. You do not want tobe talking to your friends, listening to music, or anything else that may be distracting, unless you want toincrease the amount of time you need to practice.Formation of long-term memories is highly dependent upon attention. The practice sessions I havedesigned require focus and are designed to automatically command attention. When we get to thepractice sections, you will see that there is no way you will be able to listen to music or talk to peopleand follow through with the drills recommended, so I do not think this needs any more elaboration.Consistency of RepetitionThe final aspect of fast chunking is to make sure that the repetitions you are performing are consistent.If you are practicing a specific build over and over again (more details in the practice section), youshould be doing so on the same map over and over again. You should be using the game clock so thatyou can make sure you are finishing up around the same time so that there is no noticeable differencebetween practice repetitions.Why Chunk & Perform Patterns?The whole purpose of creating chunks is that they are stored in our long-term memory and can beexecuted by other parts of the brain aside from the prefrontal cortex. In particular, the medial temporallobe and the basal ganglia both play huge roles in this process. The location and names of these brainareas are not that important, but the net effect of this is very important: chunking and repetition allowus to perform tasks and actions with minimal attention from the prefrontal cortex.Think about it this way - d

www.osirissc2guide.com – Free Starcraft 2 strategies and guide 4 Introduction As a Starcraft 2 player and fan, I have taken great interest in Starcraft 2 strategy – that is the tactics, unit combinations, and timings that help players win games. I created a websi