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Geoff Johnson: Math brains do differ from the rest of us

No sooner had I written a column about the discouraging comments by my high school math teacher (“You’re just not a math student, Johnson”) than the journal Scientific American publishes an article about brain research that indicates he might have be

No sooner had I written a column about the discouraging comments by my high school math teacher (“You’re just not a math student, Johnson”) than the journal Scientific American publishes an article about brain research that indicates he might have been at least partly right in his assessment of my shortcomings.

“How does a mathematician’s brain differ from that of a mere mortal?” will bring joy to the hearts of math teachers everywhere.

Neuroscience, it turns out, has begun to pin down whether the brain of a math whiz somehow takes conceptual thinking to another level and is different from those less-fortunate non-mathematical types.

Scientists, writes Jordana Cepelewicz, have long debated whether the basis of high-level mathematical thought is tied to the brain’s language-processing centres — whether thinking at such a level of abstraction requires linguistic representation and an understanding of syntax — or is more associated with regions governing number and spatial reasoning.

A team in France used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of 15 professional mathematicians and 15 non-mathematicians of the same academic standing.

The team found that with the mathematicians only, listening to math-related statements activated a brain network not usually associated with areas involved in language processing — a new or at least different way of thinking about symbols.

All well and good, but science still has no satisfactory response for those involved in the continuing debate about whether or not a solid foundation in arithmetic in elementary school leads to a smoother path to learning more advanced mathematics in higher grades.

Daniel Ansari, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Western Ontario, suggests: “Most of us master basic arithmetic, so we’re already recruiting these brain regions, but only a fraction of us go on to do high-level math.

“We don’t yet know whether becoming a mathematical expert changes the way you do arithmetic or whether learning arithmetic lays out the foundation for acquiring higher-level mathematical concepts.”

In other words, a chicken-and-egg conundrum.

So, might a calculus whiz still need a calculator for simple arithmetic tasks? Science says maybe yes, maybe no; it all depends on the student’s brain circuitry.

For those of us who, based on the best advice of our math teachers, fled the world of higher mathematics and sought safe haven in an appreciation of literature, art and music, there is some consolation. We might even become more tolerant of our math friends after reading a second piece in Scientific American that suggests that “equations are art inside a mathematician’s brain.”

This time, writer Clara Moscowitz quotes research suggesting that a brain area associated with emotional reactions to beauty activates when mathematicians view especially pleasing formulas.

As one who never became dreamy-eyed at the sight of polynomial or Cartesian equations, the news is good. We are not lesser beings; we just don’t think the same way as Alan Turing, Stephen Hawking or John Nash.

In the study, researchers led by Semir Zeki of University College London asked 16 mathematicians to rate 60 equations on a scale ranging from “ugly” to “beautiful.” The scientists found that the more beautiful an equation was to the mathematician, the more activity his or her brain showed in an area called the A1 field of the medial orbitofrontal cortex, which is more commonly associated with emotion.

Nor, as art history show us, are art and mathematics mutually exclusive ways of viewing the world around us. After all, mathematics can be discerned in arts such as music, dance, painting, architecture and textiles. Artists from Da Vinci to Escher explored mathematics in their works of art.

Researchers like Daniel Ansari hope to gain further insight into the effects that extraordinary expertise in a variety of fields has, or is represented by how the brain is organized.

“We can start to investigate where exceptional abilities come from, and the neurobiological correlates of high-level expertise,” Ansari says.

“I just think it’s great that we now have the capability to use brain imaging to answer these deep questions about the complexity of human abilities.”

 

Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.

gfjohnson4@shaw.ca