Developing Expertise Improves the Brain’s Ability to Concentrate

Mathematical Intelligence offers Neuroscientists a Concentration Master Class

Who Hanna in Poikon

Think about the last time you concentrated deeply on solving a difficult problem. To solve a math puzzle or determine a chess move, for example, you may need to consider multiple strategies and approaches. But little by little, the problem would come into focus. Numbers and symbols may have fallen out of place. Chances are, once upon a time, your problem was solved effortlessly on your mental board.

In recent research, my colleagues and I set out to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying these experiences. Specifically, we wanted to understand what happens in the brain while a person engages in abstract and rigorous thinking; therefore, we designed a research on mathematical expertise.

It is based on mathematics ancient brain network It is located in the upper and middle parietal regions of the outer fold of the brain. This network helps us process space, time and numbers. Past research on mathematical neurocognition has focused on brain activity when considering problems take a few seconds to solve These studies have helped clarify brain activity focused attention and supporting a special form of recall called working memory that helps people remember numbers and other details in the short term.

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But our study used longer and more complex math challenges that involve multiple steps to solve. These problems are more like the tricky puzzles that mathematicians have to work on regularly. We have seen that people with more experience in mathematics enter a a special state of deep concentration when thinking about challenging math problems. Understanding this situation may someday help scientists understand the power of concentration more broadly, as well as the potential trade-offs of downloading the solution to our problems onto our devices.

For our experiment, we recruited 22 college students—both graduate and undergraduate—who were majoring in mathematics and mathematics-related programs, such as physics or engineering, along with 22 peers from disciplines with little or no quantitative emphasis, such as physical therapy and the arts. We determined each student’s verbal, spatial and numerical intelligence quotient (IQ), as well as their level of math anxiety.

We asked students to watch step-by-step presentations, such as those that explained how to solve a variety of difficult math problems. Proving the Fibonacci identity. During this demonstration, the students wore a cap covered with electrodes to non-invasively track their brain’s electrical activity. After each presentation, they had to indicate whether they understood the demonstrations and how engaged they felt in this experience. We also encouraged the participants to watch the demos carefully, saying that they will have to explain the problem afterwards.

We found that students with more mathematical expertise have significantly different brain activity than those with less. For example, students who did little math showed more signs complex activity in the prefrontal cortexthe area behind the forehead that engages in all sorts of cognitive endeavors. This finding may reflect how hard they worked to understand the various steps of complex math demonstrations.

But things got really interesting when we turned to students who regularly engaged in quantitative thinking. We noted significant activity that appeared to connect the frontal and parietal regions of their brains. More specifically, these areas displayed a pattern of activity that neuroscientists describe as delta waves. These are very slow waves of electrical activity that are usually associated with states such as deep sleep. Obviously, these students were wide awake and very engaged, so what was going on?

Recent research suggests that these slower “sleep” delta waves may play a key role in cognitive processing that supports deep internal concentration and information transfer between distant brain regions. For example, recent studies show that a large-scale delta oscillation occurs experienced meditators they enter meditative states. One reason meditation, math problem solving, and sleep resemble each other may be that in each case, the brain needs to remove irrelevant extraneous information and unnecessary thoughts in order to truly focus and concentrate on the task at hand. (In fact, sleep can also be busy for the brain. Sleep research has revealed the irreplaceable role of deep sleep. memory consolidation; slow-wave sleep regresses neural patterns that were previously activated during a learning task.)

In fact, we suspect that the long-range delta oscillation we observed may play a role whenever people are immersed in complex and contextual problem solving. For example, we have seen that dancers and musicians exhibit similar delta waves watching dance or listening to music. This suggests that engaging brain networks in this way can be useful in many tasks that require concentration. It is likely that when people with extensive experience in a task are deeply engaged in that effort, these slow delta waves are involved, despite changes in specific brain networks. It’s also possible – although we’ll need to do more research to be sure – that state of deep concentration is generalizable: develop that mindset in one area, whether it’s dealing with trigonometry or playing the violin, and it can help you in others. .

Although our experiments involved students, and not, say, champion mathematicians or Nobel laureates, the differences in brain activity we observed are still a testament to the power of practice in expertise. Our student participants did not differ significantly in their IQ or math anxiety levels, for example. Rather, repetition and intentional or deliberate study helped some of these graduate and undergraduate students become more effective masters of quantitative thinking.

By the same logic, these findings represent a trade-off that people should be mindful of, especially as artificial intelligence and other tools offer attractive shortcuts to different ways of solving problems. Every time we download a problem to a calculator or ask ChatGPT to summarize an essay, we are missing an opportunity to improve our skills and practice deep concentration. To be clear, technologies can increase our efficiency in important ways, but the hard work we do in seemingly “inefficient” ways can also be powerful.

Given how frantically we shift from task to task and how eagerly we outsource creativity and complex problem solving to artificial intelligence in our high-speed society, I’m personally left with a question: What is happening to our human ability to solve complex problems? the future if we teach ourselves not to use deep concentration? After all, this way of thinking may be needed today more than ever to solve increasingly complex technological, environmental, and political problems.

Are you a scientist specializing in neuroscience, cognitive science or psychology? And have you read any peer reviews recently that you’d like to write for Mind Matters? Please submit suggestions here American scientific‘s Mind Matters editor at Daisy Yuhas dyuhas@sciam.com.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author(s) are not necessarily their own. American scientific.