Why Our Brains Love Shortcuts
The human brain is not designed to be a calculator. It is designed to be efficient.
Every day, your brain makes thousands of decisions automatically:
- Recognizing faces
- Estimating distance
- Interpreting tone
- Predicting outcomes
To do this quickly, it relies on heuristics—mental shortcuts that usually work well enough.
The problem is that math requires precision, not approximation. And when we apply shortcuts to precise problems, errors creep in.
When faced with a “simple” math problem, the brain often:
- Skims instead of reads carefully
- Assumes familiar patterns
- Answers based on intuition rather than logic
That’s how mistakes happen.
The Role of Order of Operations
One of the biggest reasons people get these problems wrong is a misunderstanding—or forgetting—of the order of operations.
Many people remember a version of it from school:
- Multiply and divide
- Add and subtract
But memory fades, and intuition takes over.
When numbers are presented in a linear format, the brain tends to calculate left to right, even when that’s incorrect. This habit is strong because in everyday life, left-to-right reasoning often works well enough.
Math, however, does not reward “good enough.”
Why Confidence Makes It Worse
One of the most interesting aspects of these problems is how confident people feel about their answers.
You’ll often see:
- Strong opinions
- Arguments
- Insistence that others are “overthinking it”
This confidence comes from familiarity. The problem looks like something we’ve seen before, so we trust our instincts.
Ironically, the more confident someone feels, the less likely they are to double-check their work.
In psychology, this is closely related to the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people overestimate their understanding of something simple because they don’t realize what they’re missing.
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