Try NOT to think about it.

...That is, our internal analog 'math'  develops and replicates in particular patterns. 

This alternative imagery arises from the rather strong  trial theory I am advocating that within neurons (cells), within the cytoskeleton,  we and all our living cells are running the respiration reaction in the on-going effort to harvest electron flow and to maintain stabilizing resonance. In the process of that reaction, we're  each respiring 160 kg per year of oxygen and consequently generating 10^20 water molecules per second, body-wide,  in a large number of distributed respiration sites.  Water molecules are tetrahedral-like with two positive and two negative regions (at the four vertices), and so, as each water molecule forms in the respiration site, it can do so in one of, say, six orientations within the enfolding field.  A sequence of, say, 12 molecules can then form in 6^12 or about  2.2 billion ways.   Since physics says, roughly, that everything influences everything else, repeating vibrations from our surroundings really ought to influence the formation of similar or the same sequences in the 6^n patterns of water molecules. Thus, structural coding within hydrogen bonding packets forming  within our respiration sites can naturally develop as an internal representation of our surroundings.    Since hydrogen-bonding has some influence within protein-folding and protein-folding is, for us, motility and expression,   such an internal representation would always inherently feel like something, even when unconscious.   Reinforce or structural code stacks of cellular water clusted within the matrices of newly forming proteins or xRNA chains and the representation of the external influence, and/or responses to the pattern become stronger, more persistent and interactive.

Since  this respiration/structural coding process is synergistically related with energy flow, any and all improvements in structural coding which improve energy conservation would have a selective advantage.  Consider enzymatic catalysis and the natural selection of, or migration to more general, more unified  trial scientific theories. 

Try NOT to think about it.