Page 163 - A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

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learning to appreciate your talent

Work toward an Intuitive Understanding

We can learn a lot about how to do math and science from sports. In baseball, for
example, you don’t learn how to hit in one day. Instead, your body perfects your
swing from plenty of repetition over a period of years. Smooth repetition creates

muscle memory, so that your body knows what to do from a single thought—one
chunk—instead of having to recall all the complex steps involved in hitting a
ball. 1
In the same way, once you understand why you do something in math and
science, you don’t have to keep reexplaining the how to yourself every time you
do it. It’s not necessary to go around with 100 beans in your pocket and to lay
out 10 rows of 10 beans again and again so that you get that 10 × 10 = 100. At

some point, you just know it from memory. For example, you memorize the idea
that you simply add exponents—those little superscript numbers—when
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multiplying numbers that have the same base (10 × 10 = 10 ). If you use the
procedure a lot, by doing many different types of problems, you will find that
you understand both the why and the how behind the procedure far better than
you do after getting a conventional explanation from a teacher or book. The
greater understanding results from the fact that your mind constructed the
patterns of meaning, rather than simply accepting what someone else has told
you. Remember—people learn by trying to make sense out of information they
perceive. They rarely learn anything complex simply by having someone else tell
it to them. (As math teachers say, “Math is not a spectator sport.”)
Chess masters, emergency room physicians, fighter pilots, and many other

experts often have to make complex decisions rapidly. They shut down their
conscious system and instead rely on their well-trained intuition, drawing on