Colour Neutrality in Cubing

Hey friends!

Today, I thought I would have a bit of a change in topic and tell you about something I have been doing recently in my cubing practice - becoming 'Colour Neutral'.

What is colour neutrality and why is it important?

When you learn to solve the Rubik's cube, the first step of most methods is the 'cross'. The majority of people will learn to solve the cross on one side (because it makes it easier if you always solve on the same colour) and most of those people will choose white. The problem is this starts to become a habit, meaning your brain filters out the other colours  as it's only focused on white. At the point that I am, after eighteen months solving on white, it is very difficult to see solutions on other colours because my brain is so used to recognising the white cross.

Colour neutrality basically means, when starting a solve you are able to recognise which cross, of the 6 colours on the cube, leads to the most efficient solution. You don't need to know the specifics but, as you can imagine, it means that in general you can become faster.

How am I practicing?

The first thing I had to do was slow down my solves so I could recognise the different colours. Once I was comfortable with that, it was all about drilling the different cross colours in my solves.
Initially, I started by doing an average of 50 solves every day, each day focused on a new colour. Eventually I got bored of that and decided to do as many solves as I like, with whatever cross colours I wanted (excluding white). I am continuing this strategy and I am nearly colour neutral!

I hope you found this interesting! If you did let me know! I would be happy to make more content like it.

Thanks for reading!

Some of my favourite things

Time-management technique

Time blocking

Time blocking is where you pick a task, and a period of time in your day, and when that time rolls around you sit down and do that particular task for the duration of time you allocated.

Book

'The Ship Of Cloud and Stars' by Amy Raphael.
A historical fiction novel I am currently reading, set in 1832.
It's one of my favourite books of all time so far.

Quote of the week

"Little by little, a little becomes a lot." - I'm not sure where I first heard/read this quote, but it has been very useful for me when I have struggled to find the motivation to do stuff. I just need to split the 'stuff' up into manageable sections.

Have a great week!
Cheers, Toby