Doing Math

[Chaotic Void]

Okay. This title might not sound like psychology, but bear with me as this is for me about how the mind works. I have a part-time job as a cashier again at a Wal-Mart. Fortunately, having a wife at home waiting for me makes it more bearable. In fact, much more bearable. What some people might not know on here is that I seem to have an unusual mind for mathematical ability. When someone pays me with cash, I can tell always how much change is due before the register tells me.

Recently, a friend asked me about this and said "When you do a problem, do you go left from right?" He was referring to mentally of course. Then he added "Or do you just somehow know?" I told him the latter. I don't even understand left from right. When I do multiplication in fact, and this is more than the basic multiplication table, I can see numbers, but it's not like I'm writing the problem out in my head as one would write it out on paper.

The simple answer is that for the cash register math, I just know it. For the other stuff, I just start doing it instinctively. I can't explain how it's done. I was curious if anyone on here might know something more about the way the mind works and give some explanations of this kind of phenomenon.

I've been doing that sort of thing since I was a wee lad... I've always just had a knack for Math, and it got me the nickname 'Calculator' in 3rd grade. Nowadays, since I work as a Cashier, I do this on occasion to keep my brain sharp (and I get called a 'showoff' or 'lifer' by my fellow cashiers ).

[onnabugeisha]

You might want to read Robert Burton's On Being Certain. It's a little long on conjecture, and short on data, but in it he argues that our 'certainty' is a feeling which accompanies cognitions, a somatic marker for rightness, which itself isn't generated by 'reasoning' or 'rationality'. This would lead to a couple of interesting points. First, we can't introspect the reasons behind our certainty, even if that certainty accompanies a rational, procedural cognition; the why of it occurs below decks. Second, the feeling can be wrong, and attached to things it shouldn't be attached to (See the so-called God center), or not attached to things to which it should be attached (See Capgras delusion). People often like to argue that the mental process known as reasoning and rationality exists apart from non-rational processes. However, both cognitive bias and modern psychology and neurology seem to point the other direction.

By the way, if you're experiencing numbers in a modality other than just as mental concept (sight, sound, smell), that's called synesthesia.

[Soyeong]

I'm sort of similar. I did math competitions in school, and would usually do well on them, but during the team portions of the tournament (where I would team up with other people from my school), I would be little to no help, because I usually did problems completely differently from how anybody else did, often not using established formulas, etc. (often because I didn't know them but could intuitively find a way to do them); and wouldn't really be able to explain my ways of thinking to my teammates.

My favorite memory of being on the math team was one of the questions on the team portion. I forget what the question was, but there were four solutions and two mathematical ways of solving it, but each way would only give three of the solutions, so it had to be solved both ways to be done correctly. I didn't know how to do either way, but it only took a couple minutes to do a brute force guess and check to find all four solutions. My team was the usually near the bottom of the rankings, but we were the only one at the competition to get that question right.

[Cerebrum123]

The only time I ever really had any problem with math, was when they were trying to force me to do it within a time limit, or showing my work on paper. The first dropped my grades down lower than they should(IMO they shouldn't expect a person to be able to all kinds of equations within 60 seconds, AND get them all right). The second one was mostly just irritating, because even when I did so, no one actually went over it or anything.

[onnabugeisha]

I was a terrible student, both inside and outside of math, but math was probably the most telling because everything built upon everything else. So by the time I got to college, I had terrible skills, as a result of never studying and never doing the homework. I've moved on to make philosophy my game, but I would love to have learned math in a deep lasting way. I've thought at times about going back and teaching myself, starting with the basics, and doing it all over again, without cheating the way I did before, but I suspect that would never work, and motivating myself for such a project would be very difficult. Still, I miss math.