Mental mathematics is an important skill that can help keep our brains fast and sharp. It is not just an oral calculation in the mind, but it is the training of brain cells that can have a positive impact on cognitive abilities in general. Mental math helps to improve a person's sense of numbers, the ability to understand relationships between quantities, and their memory. It also increases a person's ability to store large amounts of information in their brain and develop logical thinking, which allows them to increase their problem-solving skills.
Research conducted by Vinod Menon, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, revealed how a year of early math classes can change children's brains. MRIs showed that there are physical changes in the hippocampus, which is the area of the brain associated with memory. The stronger the connections in the hippocampus, the greater the ability of each person to remember facts by heart. Kathy Mann Koepke from the National Institutes of Health shared advice to parents that they should continue doing math exercises with their children as experience matters and those simple multiplication and addition exercises could go a long way.
The first benefit of developing mental math skills in a child is their ability to concentrate. JAMS is an Abacus-centered mathematics school that uses Abacus & Anzan instruction to help children grow and learn lifelong skills. Mathematical concepts are based on each other and it's important to have an idea of numbers to understand complex concepts. Scult states: “It is possible that training the brain with mental mathematics strengthens the capacity for emotional reevaluation or, perhaps, continuously executing the process of emotional reevaluation increases the ability to perform other types of mental calculations, such as mental arithmetic.”Mental mathematics is when a child is able to determine the correct answers to mathematical equations without the use of anything other than their brain.
Calculating mathematical problems from memory may seem unrelated to the daily processing of emotions, but they have more in common than you might think. In conclusion, mental math helps to keep our brains fast and sharp by improving our sense of numbers, memory, and logical thinking. It also increases our ability to store large amounts of information in our brain and develop problem-solving skills. Research has shown that there are physical changes in the hippocampus when children do math exercises which increases their ability to remember facts by heart. Parents should continue doing math exercises with their children as experience matters and those simple multiplication and addition exercises could go a long way.