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.

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!