You'll Love Math Problems After You Read This. Thank you, Hanna Poikonen

From November 2024's Scientific American..

Previous studies on neurocognition in mathematics focused on what happens in the brain while people consider problems that take a few seconds to solve. These studies have helped illuminate brain activity that supports focused attention and a special form of recall called working memory, which the brain uses to keep numbers and other details top of mind in the short term.

In our work, we used longer, more complex math challenges that had to be solved in multiple steps. These problems are more akin to the tricky puzzles that mathematicians must tackle regularly. We found that people with more experience in mathematics enter a special state of deep concentration when thinking about hard math problems.

Very slow delta brain waves are typically associated with deep sleep, not with intense concentration. So what was going on?

Subject	Observation	Indication
Students whose coursework involved little math	More signs of complex activity in the prefrontal cortex, an area just behind the forehead that is en­­gaged in all kinds of cognitive efforts.	These students working hard to understand complex steps of the demo being watched
Students who engaged in quantitative thinking regularly	Activity that appeared to link the frontal and parietal regions of their brain. More specifically, these areas exhibited a pattern of activity that neuroscientists call delta waves. These very slow waves of electrical activity are typically associated with states such as deep sleep.	The brain needs to suppress irrelevant external information and unneeded thoughts to concentrate on the task at hand. B waves were similar to those of experienced meditators

It’s also possible that this state of immersive concentration is generalizable: develop this way of thinking in one domain, whether it’s tackling trigonometry or playing the violin, and it could help you in others.

Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about for Mind Matters? Please send suggestions to Scientific American’s Mind Matters editor Daisy Yuhas at dyuhas@sciam.com