I love to be quicker than anyone else: Bhanu Prakash

Hyderabad: A regular school going student become the fastest human calculator in the world. A 19-year-old Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash Jonnalagadda has superhuman abilities in doing complex mathematical calculations at unimaginable, amazing speed with 100 per cent accuracy. This has earned him the nicknames "The Number Prodigy" and "The Fastest Human Calculator in the World." His brain processes numbers 10 times faster than an average human brain.

He holds 50 Limca Book Records and 4 World Records for being 'The Fastest Human Calculator'. Bhanu is a 4-time TedX speaker, founder and CEO of three companies and has been invited by various global institutions in 17 countries to share and teach "how to amplify human brain's efficiency" where he shares his secrets and tools that he developed.

He has been helping students, corporates and entrepreneurs in mental ability training, harnessing infinite potentials of human brain and mathematical thinking as a tool to increase brain's efficiency. He regularly holds workshops, seminars and trainings for corporates and students on parallel thinking, partitioning thought, analytical and critical thinking.

Bhanu Prakash did his schooling in Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan's Public School, Jubilee Hills, Hyderabad. Currently he is studying in St Stephen's College, Delhi. Bhanu inspired by the great Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan and other ancient Indian mathematical geniuses. He is carrying their work forward by teaching and inspiring youth to harness their brain's infinite potentials by using mathematics as a tool.

"The last couple of years, I have been working across schools in India to change the way kids look at numbers and mathematics. After working with 20+ schools across India in inculcating mathematical concepts and breaking the general taboo of "Math is boring" across stages through immense demonstrations like "Man vs Machine" and "Math is Fun!" workshops, I see myself working towards my goal of breaking math phobia in kids and in making mental math a performing art.

I'm currently working on an arithmetic literacy building courseware which is to be implemented across govt. schools in the Hyderabad region. There's a lot more to do and a long way to go" said Bhanu Prakash. Excerpts from an interview:

Why do most kids tend to be scared of Mathematics? Is it due to bad teaching or boring syllabus?

I have worked with a lot of students who are math-phobic. What I have observed is that, kids being math phobic, has some reasons from psychological roots.

The environment in which the kid grows in, generally tries to impose on him several wrong notions like "Math is Hard", "Concentrate on Mathematics!" "Mug Up these tables" "Algebra! OMG" which either scares him off or makes him bored of the subject.The way of teaching plays a crucial role too. While making a kid do math, the "How to Do?" aspect is given more importance rather than the "Why to Do?" aspect.

How can one increase their thinking speed? Speed thinking may be defined as "acceleration of thinking process for effective delivery of output". To think quick is to observe, grasp, process things quickly. Since a lot of people have already answered to the observational skills and how to improve them, I would like to touch over a few unorthodox approaches to what can make you a quicker thinker.

These ideas which I lay out in the paragraphs to come are inspired from my personal experiences in becoming the fastest human calculator in the world. To understand speed thinking this way, you'd have to understand the concept of perception of time and distraction planning. The latter concentrates more on how to counter the lags which we generally face.

Perception of time: Measurement of time is always objective. Time is a fixed physical quantity which can be broken down into hours, minutes and seconds. But, the perception of time by the human brain is relative. What if I were to tell you that we perceive time intervals differently, depending on the activity which our brain is performing.

So if you could somehow slow the time perception of yours, it would be as if you are thinking quickly and this might seem very abstract in the beginning but is something which is very possible. Planning out your distractions can aid you in this manner, to slow your perception of time which will thus make you a quicker thinker.