Explore chess
What your brain is doing during a single move
Eight regions, and the job each one is generally associated with in cognitive neuroscience, lined up against what a player is actually doing between looking at the board and letting go of the piece.
Prefrontal cortex
Front of the frontal lobe
Generally associated with. Holding a goal in mind, weighing options, and stopping yourself acting on the first idea.
At the board. The gap between seeing a move and playing it. Beginners have almost no gap. That gap is teachable.
Read this before you quote any of it
Everything on that diagram is a description of what a brain does when anybody plans anything. Cooking a meal in the right order uses most of the same map. None of it is evidence that chess improves those regions, makes children cleverer, or raises exam results.
You will find chess marketing that takes this kind of diagram and adds an arrow saying chess grows this part. There is no good evidence for that arrow, so it is not here. The largest school trial ever run went looking for an effect on attainment across 100 schools and 4,009 pupils and found none.
The honest version is more useful anyway. Chess is a setting where a child has to do all eight of those things, in order, forty times an hour, and enjoys doing it. That is worth a place in a school week without needing to be dressed up as brain training.