10 ways to improve your mental maths skills

Never get confused when splitting the bill again...

of 10

Do pointless puzzles

You can think of your brain as a muscle. A muscle that looks like a giant wad of well-chewed chewing gum, but still. It needs exercising, and it's been shown that doing pointless puzzles like Sudoku, crosswords or brain training games on those handheld "electronic devices" they have now can boost your mental arithmetic skills.

Of course, they've also been shown to have no effect whatsoever. Depends on which study you look at, really. But you may as well do the puzzles anyway because it passes the time on the commute, and stops you from reading people's papers over their shoulder. They hate that.

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Binge on chocolate

It may sound like some mad jest, but chocolate can make you do maths better. We know this thanks to an incredibly far-fetched experiment where volunteers were given cocoa laced with extra amounts of flavanols, which are compounds found in chocolate. The result: they did calculations more quickly and accurately. You need to eat very dark chocolate to get the flavanols in you, though. Sorry, Topic fans.

Image: George Redgrave / (CC BY 2.0) / Via Flickr: funfilledgeorgie
Get your meditation on

Meditation – it's just a more difficult way of sitting down, isn't it? It's just for people who eat flaxseeds and rub twigs while humming, yes? Oh get with the 21st Century, everyone's at it now. Plus, according to at least one study we could be bothered to look up on Google, it can trigger real improvement in mathematical ability. So put your legs in a pretzel position, close your eyes and have a good long think about nothing. Oh, and speaking of flaxseeds…

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Eat stuff you hate

We've given you the good news, which is that chocolate can make you good at maths. Here's the bad news: so can flaxseeds. And chia seeds. And perilla oil. They're exactly the sorts of things you think they are. They're the sorts of things which, if you were to show to your granddad and proclaim to be food, he would laugh right in your stupid hippy face.

Sadly, though, the omega-3 content has been shown to boost problem-solving skills, and generally keep your brain glowing with health. So tuck in, and don't skimp on the fish capsules either.

Image: David Neubert / neubie
Zap your brain

If you're a maths moron, your brain may just need a good jolt. Literally. In yet another strange study, scientists gave people something called "transcranial random noise stimulation", which involved electrodes and painless "shocks". It significantly enhanced their maths skills and recall. On the downside, as one expert warned, there's a risk of "scalp burns". A small price to pay for nailing that long division, we think.

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Move yourself, damnit

We've already said brains are like muscles, but actual muscles are even more like muscles. And moving them about has an unlikely, almost magical side-effect. According to people peering at things on slides, hard exercise can actually stimulate the growth of brain cells. Yes: exercise literally makes your brain bigger, and faster, and better. Which is why Wayne Rooney is such a dab hand at algebra. We presume.

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Spatial training

Shapes are great aren't they? With their points and sides and jutty-out bits. A study was done in which volunteers were trained in spatial awareness – identifying shapes, imagining objects being halved and re-orientated, that sort of thing. And lo, after just 20 MINUTES, the same people showed improvement in doing calculations. Admittedly, the subjects here were young children, but aren't we all just larger, saggier children? Yes.
Guesstimate for glory

As well as seeking out the spatial training on your shiny, show-offy brain training app, you should also guesstimate all the time. See a flock of birds? Guesstimate how many there are. See a colleague you don't particularly like? Guesstimate how many times you could slap him before he weeps. Believe it or not, research shows that making yourself better at the "approximate number system" (ie, guessing quantities of things) makes you better at the "symbolic number system" (ie, actual maths). True story.

Image: Russell James Smith / (CC BY 2.0) / Via Flickr: russelljsmith
Do something different

The words "outside your comfort zone" belongs with "work hard, play hard", "team player" and "touching base" in the dustbin of exhausted human phrases. Even so, go outside your comfort zone. It could be something as simple as reading a book you'd normally only grunt at, or cooking a totally new and scary dish. Or it could be jumping out of a plane (with a parachute, ideally). The point is, new experiences refresh your brain, and make it more agile. Even when it comes to maths.

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Read actual maths stuff

When all's said and done, if you really want to become better at maths, do more maths. The internet isn't just tweets and pictures of idiots, you know. You can actually discover nifty tricks on algebra, geometry, quadratic equations, all of that. Read, practice, become better. Because, according to research conducted by a Norway university, the only way to really become better at maths is to practice doing maths. No sh*t, Euclid.

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