Your Brain is Better at Math than You Think

Are you're like me and have a fear of math? Some of us think our brains are just incapable of solving any math problems of the least complexity. But the truth is that your brain performs wondrously complex math gymnastics while you're awake and maybe even while you sleep. You'd be amazed at how good your brain can even do calculus, while you're not even conscious of it.

I'll try to prove it if you'll play along with this simple exercise. Focus on a small dot in front of you. Here. Let me even provide the dot for you.

For those who are listening to the audio version and aren't reading or watching, just stare at a small object a couple of feet in front of you. Now keep your eyes focused on that spot and slowly move your head to the left as far as you can while still looking at the spot. Then slowly all the way to the right. Now move your head more quickly. Left to right. Up and down. Move your head in circles, keeping your focus on the dot. (If someone in the room thinks you've lost your mind, you can explain yourself later.) Now here's the point of this weird exercise: Carefully notice how your eyes are moving in relation to your head, shifting in the opposite direction in almost precise proportion to your head's location as it moves around; all so your eyes can stay focused on the intended object. Right now you're doing this voluntarily, but isn't it amazing how this reflex of coordination happens on a subconscious level practically all of your waking hours!

This process is the vestibulo-ocular reflex, or VOR. Yea, I agree. Let's just call it the VOR. Lower life forms like fish operate with a much simpler eye and body movement orientation that's nowhere as complex as our VOR. Until you started doing this little VOR experiment, I'll bet you never thought of all the intricacies involved between the muscles of both of your eyes and the retina, neurons, not just one but various regions of the brain where the VOR actions are sorted out at amazing speed, not to mention the functions of the semicircular canal of your inner ear that helps your head and body stay balanced, special receptors in your neck muscles, and I could go on and on. And, if you really think about it while doing this exercise, you'll realize that this precise coordination between your head or body movement and your eyes must involve some pretty advanced mathematics. More specifically, calculus.

Above illustration from Wikipedia. "Vestibulo-ocular reflex." I don't recommend trying to memorize it.

Calculus could be called the study of change. During VOR the brain is studying things like the rate of change in direction and speed of your head as you move it around so your brain can then compute this data and make your eyes move just right, all while ensuring you don't lose your balance and hurt yourself. The process of "neural integration" implies that meaningful mathematical integers must be computed in the brain and communicated to the eye muscles and other organs at blinding speed through an elaborate feedback loop for VOR to work correctly.

So, even though your conscious brain might have a lot of trouble working out most math problems, to the fearful point of making you avoid math like the plague, your unconscious brain and connected organs are running complex calculus equations in the background, at astonishing speed, all the time. And aren't you glad it's an unconscious process! This and so many other crucial brain functions, it seems, would literally drive us crazy if we were consciously aware of them every time they happened!

Now consciously think about this: If we had to ponder the VOR from a strictly evolutionary viewpoint, it would logically follow that somewhere way back in the evolutionary past, before we were actually homo sapiens, there had to be a state of affairs among our ancestors' biological makeup in which the neural framework that performs calculations for the VOR did not exist, right? Somewhere along the very long chain of evolution from relatively simple, single-celled life to our present human state, some particular ancestor of ours had to go from not having a calculus-performing system to having one, though, granted, it wouldn't have to carry out equations as complex as our modern subconscious. Somehow at some time, the perceptual reflexes in your biological ancestors went from operating by relatively simple physical laws to something incredibly more complex: a calculating system that almost perfectly times out and balances our eye coordination with mathematical precision. Mysteriously along the way, evolution caused mathematical operations to arise from non-math--so the thinking goes. But if this ancestral neural system were not mathematically precise at the moment it first arose from chance mutations, it's hard to see how it would have any value for survivability.  How could the neural system preserve the species for further evolution? So to say this subconscious "brain calculus" of ours arose through a long chain of lucky random mutations preserved by natural selection? That just doesn't seem to add up, does it?



On Your Nerves

Under a microscope, neurons look fascinating and strange. What neurons actually do and how electric signals are sent from your brain throughout your body is incredibly complex. In fact, it's seems safe to assume that the human brain itself is the most complex thing in the entire universe--not to mention the arrangement of your brain working with your central and peripheral nervous systems! Science discovers one new astounding mystery after another when examining the makeup of the human brain and neurons. Like many things in science, the more we learn, the more we realize that what we've discovered barely scratches the surface regarding the complexities of life.

When it comes to the brain and neurology, we have to face the fact that this incredible process that keeps your body functioning and allows your mind to keep thinking consciously and unconsciously has to have been intentionally designed. Exactly how the mysterious neurosystem works to keep the target of life in its sights is far beyond any one's comprehension. And, honestly, how anyone could stay committed to the idea that this came about by random evolution is also way beyond understanding--at least my own.

As you probably already know, the neurons composing the brain and nerves cause body parts to move and sense things by firing electrical impulses through the neural network. This is comparable to the way the wiring system throughout your house carries the electric circuit that flows to and from your appliances and makes them work. One big difference is that your body, while much smaller than a house, has a far more complex electrical system carrying out far more simultaneous functions. Therefore, all the wiring in our bodies--our nervous system--has to be packed a lot tighter.

Think about a particular part of your house's electrical setup that does have more tightly packed wiring, say your entertainment system. Now imagine all those wires and power cords behind that system stripped of their insulation. If all that wiring were bare, it would be bad news. No way your electronics would work properly, if at all. Hot exposed wires would short out your electronics and maybe even set your living room on fire. Thank goodness for the rubbery insulation that protects each wire from the electrical actions of the others, allowing the whole system to operate according to design.

Did you know that there's a similar type of insulation designed to keep your neurological wiring from shorting out? Most neuron cells have within their strange compositions a thin fiber called an axon. The axon is much like a wire that connects its neuron to other neurons which are connected to other neurons and so on, making up the complex electrical system of your body. The possibility for precise, stable neuron to neuron communications, or "action potentials," in which electrical impulses efficiently fire within your brain and throughout your nervous system, requires these biological wire fibers--axons--to be properly insulated. So isn't it neat that the part of the axon that conducts electrical impulses and relays the corresponding information to other neurons is carefully and masterfully insulated in non-conductive stuff? Neurobiologists call this non-conductive tubing around the axon the myelin sheath.

Of course there are significant differences between the rubber of electrical wiring and the biological properties of the myelin sheath. The non-conductivity of rubber and other insulators is pretty easy to understand. Rubber is "airy" material. It's not very dense, so the chain reaction that maintains electricity has trouble surviving rubber. The biochemistry that makes the myelin sheath non-conductive, on the other hand, is far more complex and mystifying.

So, naturally, things can really go haywire for the neurosystem if a person's myelin sheathing is malformed or deteriorates. Neurological diseases like multiple sclerosis are caused by this deterioration, usually when the body's own immune system breaks down the myelin for some reason. It causes the person with MS to lose some degree of control of certain muscles and/or thinking processes because their nerves start to "short circuit."

Nevertheless, when the big bundle of wires composing your nervous system is healthy and functioning as designed, the electrical impulses continue to flow nice and smooth, moment to moment, giving you the ability to move without thinking about it, and even to think without thinking about it. But as we're intellectually stimulated from the electrical stimulation of neurons, do you think that it all came from chance? If so, I find that quite "shocking!"