New Yorker Magazine Article Posits Our Brains Are Hardwired for Math

March 4, 2008

The New Yorker magazine (March 3, 2008), in its section on the annals of science, highlighted a "numbers guy" who makes the case that human brain is wired for mathematics.

According to Stanislas Dehaene, a Paris-based neuroscientist, people have a “number sense” of basic calculations and estimation. Difficulties arise, however, when we begin to learn mathematics and then have to perform procedures that are not instinctive.

The existence of an evolved number ability had long been implied, according to the article, based on research with animals and infants. Evidence from brain-damaged patients, moreover, gave clues to where in the brain this so-called center of mathematics is located. “In one experiment I particularly liked,”  Dehaene said, he "tried to map the whole parietal lobe in a half hour," by having one of his subjects move his eyes and hands, point his fingers, grasp objects, and do calculations.

What he found within the subject's brain, he said "was a beautiful geometrical organization to the areas that were activated. The eye movements were at the back, the hand movements were in the middle, grasping was in the front, and so on. And right in the middle, we were able to confirm, was an area that cared about number.”

Thus, Dehaene concluded, “The idea that all children are different, and that they need to discover things their own way, I don’t buy it at all." Rather, he asserted, there is "one brain organization. We see it in babies, we see it in adults. Basically, with a few variations, we’re all travelling on the same road.”

Dehaene especially admires the mathematics curricula of China and Japan, which provide students with a structured experience, anticipating the kind of responses they make at each stage of learning and presenting them with challenges designed to minimize errors.

Source: The New Yorker