Happy Brain
How we were taught math versus what our brain loves ?
Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah my wonderful people !
I’m touching base with you from Las Vegas, I wanted to spend a week here to really understand how each Casino works - from Paris to the Venetian, from Caesars Palace to the Bellagio … and beyond
The dancing-yellow Bellagio fountain under the dark skies of the night in Las Vegas is breathtaking - it only reminds me of Danny Ocean and his crew of rapscallions, fiends and thieves
The entire casino floor, everything from Craps to Roulette, from Blackjack to Baccarat, and understanding the odds and lines of an NFL game in real time - is one giant bubble of probability and statistics, isn’t it ?
Not too dissimilar to the trading floor is it ?
… or buying and selling stocks under rapidly changing market conditions - where you need to estimate and revise your odds of making a profit in real time
This inevitably brings to me to how we were taught math when we were younger
It is very hard to do math the way we were taught in middle school … or high school as a matter of fact
One of my quirks is not understanding, and never been able to understand - the order of operations in math. My brain will unapologetically short-circuit if you ask me to do
5 + 3 divided by 4
It irritates me to no end that I have to remember rules to do math, such as order of operations called PEMDAS. It’s an acronym for understanding which math operation comes first, multiplication and division as opposed to addition and subtraction
Parenthesis, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition and Subtraction
What a colossal waste of brain space
So, I have no idea if, 5 + 3 / 4 is
or
and apparently some people in the world are perfectly fine with it when you ask them to do : 5 + 3 / 4
God bless their soul, and I have nothing but ghost pepper Scoville level of scorn for those people, because of their innate ability to do that
I’m just a simpleton from the hills, when I see people who can do things that I cannot, I get defensive and petty, and very soon, I get really jealous of them
One of the biggest reasons why I got good at deriving things myself is because I hate to remember expressions made by Bob or Megyn. I only really want to understand the intuition and I’ll derive the other things myself, like how we got to 72 last week
I don’t think I was taught math the PEMDAS way when I was young, or may be they did teach it to me, and I screwed around and never paid attention to it. I think most kids learn math in high school using PEMDAS, or another awful way of saying the same thing - BODMAS. ‘tis all the same thing for - which - mathematical operation to do first in an equation
So, I have asked every one of my project managers or research investigators to use parenthesis when specifying models
All is fine with the world when they say
(5+3)/4 or 5+(3/4)
My brain is as calm as a baby panda, when I see parenthesis in an expression, it like valium for my brain
So, why are we talking about this ?
It’s because the way we were taught math in high school is at times, bipolar to how our brains operate
For instance, our brains love adding way more than subtracting, and it loves building by stacking one piece on top of each other, as opposed to taking out pieces from a fully molded thing
I’ll prove it to you
What is 59 times 37 ? and getting to the answer real time as the clock is ticking essentially means - speed is of paramount importance
The conventional way we were taught to do this - is by doing the following
59
x
37
—
7 times 9 is 63. We use the 3 and carry over 6 in memory. 7 times 5 is 35, we then add 6 to it, this is now 413
We then add a 0 to the far right in the second row
Then, 3 times 9 is 27. We use the 7 and carry over 2. Then 3 times 5 is 15, and now we add 2, and this is now 1770
We then add 413 and 1770, which is 2183
Our brains have to remember the carry-over estimate, then do a different addition or multiplication, and then add the carry-over to it
It can do it, but that’s not how it is wired to do math, this entire operation is called right to left, because we get to the answer by doing math - right to left
It’s like ripping out apple slices out of a perfectly crispy, flakey and butter-y apple pie, because you want to eat apple and forgot to buy apple from Whole Foods
You can do it, but that don’t mean you should
Like drying up your rain-soaked t-shirt in a microwave, or asking your wife’s sister out two days after your divorce papers are signed
Let us try the more intuitive way - the happy brain way
59 times 37
Let us break it down into simpler pieces - and remember, our brains love to add way more than subtract
(59 x 37)
= (50 x 37) + (9 x 37)
50 x 37 = (50 x 30) + (50 x 7)
= 1500 + 350
= 1850
9 x 37 = (9 x 30) + (9 x 7)
= 270 + 63
= 333
1850 + 333
= 1850 + 300 + 33
= 2150 + 33
= 2183
This approach is called left to right, and it is based on a few things our brains love : adding in little logical (multiples of 50 or 100) chunks, no carryovers and no remembering things from previous mathematical operations, and multiplying numbers by 10 or multiples of 10 - like with anything that has a 0 at the end
See how intuitive this is ? as opposed to the tearing into the apple pie to get apple - way
Our brains are wired to do math - left to right, but we were taught to do math - right to left
‘tis a colossal shame !
Since y’all know I love blaming other people for my wheelbarrow full of shortcomings, my C+’s and Ds in high school math is because I was taught the wrong way
My shortcomings and failures are never really my fault … they should put that on my tombstone
They really should