49
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: not found

      Origins of the brain networks for advanced mathematics in expert mathematicians

      research-article

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPMC
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Significance

          Our work addresses the long-standing issue of the relationship between mathematics and language. By scanning professional mathematicians, we show that high-level mathematical reasoning rests on a set of brain areas that do not overlap with the classical left-hemisphere regions involved in language processing or verbal semantics. Instead, all domains of mathematics we tested (algebra, analysis, geometry, and topology) recruit a bilateral network, of prefrontal, parietal, and inferior temporal regions, which is also activated when mathematicians or nonmathematicians recognize and manipulate numbers mentally. Our results suggest that high-level mathematical thinking makes minimal use of language areas and instead recruits circuits initially involved in space and number. This result may explain why knowledge of number and space, during early childhood, predicts mathematical achievement.

          Abstract

          The origins of human abilities for mathematics are debated: Some theories suggest that they are founded upon evolutionarily ancient brain circuits for number and space and others that they are grounded in language competence. To evaluate what brain systems underlie higher mathematics, we scanned professional mathematicians and mathematically naive subjects of equal academic standing as they evaluated the truth of advanced mathematical and nonmathematical statements. In professional mathematicians only, mathematical statements, whether in algebra, analysis, topology or geometry, activated a reproducible set of bilateral frontal, Intraparietal, and ventrolateral temporal regions. Crucially, these activations spared areas related to language and to general-knowledge semantics. Rather, mathematical judgments were related to an amplification of brain activity at sites that are activated by numbers and formulas in nonmathematicians, with a corresponding reduction in nearby face responses. The evidence suggests that high-level mathematical expertise and basic number sense share common roots in a nonlinguistic brain circuit.

          Related collections

          Most cited references41

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: found
          • Article: not found

          How learning to read changes the cortical networks for vision and language.

          Does literacy improve brain function? Does it also entail losses? Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we measured brain responses to spoken and written language, visual faces, houses, tools, and checkers in adults of variable literacy (10 were illiterate, 22 became literate as adults, and 31 were literate in childhood). As literacy enhanced the left fusiform activation evoked by writing, it induced a small competition with faces at this location, but also broadly enhanced visual responses in fusiform and occipital cortex, extending to area V1. Literacy also enhanced phonological activation to speech in the planum temporale and afforded a top-down activation of orthography from spoken inputs. Most changes occurred even when literacy was acquired in adulthood, emphasizing that both childhood and adult education can profoundly refine cortical organization.
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: not found
            • Book: not found

            The Origin of Concepts

              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: not found

              Sources of mathematical thinking: behavioral and brain-imaging evidence.

              Does the human capacity for mathematical intuition depend on linguistic competence or on visuo-spatial representations? A series of behavioral and brain-imaging experiments provides evidence for both sources. Exact arithmetic is acquired in a language-specific format, transfers poorly to a different language or to novel facts, and recruits networks involved in word-association processes. In contrast, approximate arithmetic shows language independence, relies on a sense of numerical magnitudes, and recruits bilateral areas of the parietal lobes involved in visuo-spatial processing. Mathematical intuition may emerge from the interplay of these brain systems.
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Journal
                Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
                Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A
                pnas
                pnas
                PNAS
                Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
                National Academy of Sciences
                0027-8424
                1091-6490
                3 May 2016
                11 April 2016
                : 113
                : 18
                : 4909-4917
                Affiliations
                [1] aCognitive Neuroimaging Unit, Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique et aux Énergies Alternatives, Direction des Sciences du Vivant/Institut d’Imagerie Biomédicale, INSERM, NeuroSpin Center, Université Paris-Sud and Université Paris-Saclay , 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France;
                [2] bInstitut de Formation Doctorale, Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, Université Paris 06, Sorbonne Universités , 75005 Paris, France;
                [3] c Collège de France , 75005 Paris, France
                Author notes
                1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: marie.amalric@ 123456cea.fr or stanislas.dehaene@ 123456cea.fr .

                This contribution is part of the special series of Inaugural Articles by members of the National Academy of Sciences elected in 2010.

                Contributed by Stanislas Dehaene, March 2, 2016 (sent for review January 19, 2016; reviewed by Daniel Ansari and Martin Monti)

                Author contributions: M.A. and S.D. designed research; M.A. performed research; M.A. and S.D. analyzed data; and M.A. and S.D. wrote the paper.

                Reviewers: D.A., Western University, Brain and Mind Institute; and M.M., University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Psychology.

                Article
                PMC4983814 PMC4983814 4983814 201603205
                10.1073/pnas.1603205113
                4983814
                27071124
                e1fc00fb-8460-4e00-9e67-6a76be3d4e97
                History
                Page count
                Pages: 9
                Categories
                1
                Social Sciences
                Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
                Biological Sciences
                Neuroscience
                From the Cover
                Inaugural Article

                functional MRI,semantic judgment,mathematical cognition

                Comments

                Comment on this article