Mental Math
Hi! This week lots of us have gone back to school! To get into the school spirit, I thought of posting this bit of information I found out! Hope you find it Mathtastic!
Adding, subtracting, dividing, and multiplying are things that we must know how to do. It seems like a nuisance trying to memorize our multiplication tables or to do long division. In school, when we are asked to learn our facts we often think that we’re never going to use them. What good are they? But as we grow older we realize that to do more complicated math, we must know the basics. Not only do we use math in our everyday lives, but our brain also recognizes itself as we learn math.
Adding, subtracting, dividing, and multiplying are things that we must know how to do. It seems like a nuisance trying to memorize our multiplication tables or to do long division. In school, when we are asked to learn our facts we often think that we’re never going to use them. What good are they? But as we grow older we realize that to do more complicated math, we must know the basics. Not only do we use math in our everyday lives, but our brain also recognizes itself as we learn math.
This was proved by
a team of scientists from Stanford University in California. These scientists
had proven this by performing an experiment involving 28 students between the
ages of 7 to 9 years old. Each person was given a basic math problem such as,
3+4=7. The students then had to press a button to confirm whether this was the
right answer. They took scans of their brains as they did the problems without
the help of a calculator. The scans showed that as the students did the
questions certain parts of the brain became active. Dr. Kathy
Mann Koepeke said that it was as if the answers to basic subtraction, addition,
and multiplication problems are kept in a long-term storage compartment in the
brain. This storage area was built by repetition. By learning math we are
becoming mathematicians! 
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