About a week ago I was introduced to a game called Brain Age. It calculates the speed and accuracy of the player's knowledge in a certain subject area such as mental math, memory, or creativity and spits out a score between 20-100. I was age 21 in math. I did not second guess my result because all Asians are good at math. It is simply innate! It has to do with the stringent Chinese education system and how we pretty much invented mathematics...Right?
I had always been proud of my ability to perform tasks involving arithmetic or counting at lightning speeds. When I witnessed dad painstakingly trying to help my brother memorize the times table, I simply suggested he think of numbers in Chinese, where every number and character is read as a single syllable. This was my epiphany.
While casually reading school-unrelated material, Malcolm Gladwell confirmed my hypothesis in his book "Outliers". It appears that the Chinese, Korean and Japanese language employs a highly logical numerical system, where numbers 1-10 each contain 1 syllable and any number above 10 reads as "ten one, ten two, ten three..." in comparison to "eleven, twelve, thirteen...". This gives Asian languages a timely advantage against the brain's 2 second memory window and undoubtly allows arithmetic calculations to take place faster.
Yes. Many Asians are great at math but don't feel bad because it is certainly not innate. We simply have the unspoken advantage of language that helps us to perhaps appear younger in Brain Age.
My teacher from Finland gradually transitioned from English as a second language to her primary language. She noted that her thoughts were now in English, even though she had spent the first 18 years of her life speaking and thinking in a completely different language.
ReplyDeleteIf this is a similar phenomena that you've experienced, I wonder if the ability to perform arithmetic calculations at an exceptional rate is solely due to the language advantage. I can see how the Asian system of doing calculations could be much easier to work with, but at some point does the eye simply input the visual information and pull from memory without second thought? Perhaps it is the constant repetition of these that aids in the ability to perform faster and with greater accuracy.
Having played Brain Age and done the calculations, I have seen significant improvement in my ability to do arithmetic quickly. I strongly believe that I've done the calculations so much that my mind simply sees the numbers and signs and is able to recall from memory the corresponding number.
(Then again, it's late so I don't know if this comment makes sense at all, haha.)
Practice and familiarity is a catalyst in almost any situation. ie. multiple-time stimulations will strenghten neuronal pathways to fire faster which aids in memory. After a threshold, the brain likely processes the information so fast that it becomes "thoughtless". So yes. Practice is a definitely a factor in increasing Brain Age. (Hence only being able to record score once a day...)
ReplyDeleteWhat I am contending here is that differences in thoughts ie. with language may give a different type of advantage which may surface upon a first time situation.