Brain Reorganizes To Make Room For Math

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/38793/title/Brain_reorganizes_to_make_room_for_math?

by pg • 18 years ago

36 23 18 years ago

mixmax• 18 years ago

Intresting. This also indicates that teaching kids math is a good idea.

newt0311• 18 years ago

Teaching kids almost anything (worth teaching) is a good idea. By the time kids grow over 10, large portions of their learning abilities are gone. For example, consider languages. Kids growing up with multiple languages learn them with ease, but for most adults, learning a foreign language is nearly impossible.

The early years are a person's best chance to expand their minds.

tokenadult3• 18 years ago

It's an open area of research (mentioned in some recent HN threads, in fact) whether all areas of learning have the same plasticity in adult life. It does appear, in the interest of efficiency in using language, perhaps, that language learning plasticity drops sharply after puberty. (Although I got good enough in Chinese to work for many years as a Chinese-English interpreter, even though I didn't start learning the language until age seventeen.) On the other hand, a lot of other skills can be learned to very high levels indeed after surprisingly late starts.

Children also need time to play, and maybe one of the most important things start-up entrepreneurs can figure out is forms of play for children that bolster or increase their plasticity for learning what they need to learn as they grow up.

tokenadult3• 18 years ago

It will be a good follow-up area of research to see how much of that brain reorganization from early childhood to adulthood can be influenced by experience, that is by good education. Here's a link

http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...

to a very informative book about math education and how it can be better. I strongly suspect the brain reorganization happens better and faster for learners with good math teachers rather than lousy math teachers.

zack2• 18 years ago

I'm taking a class on psychological development of mathematics in children next quarter. I'll bump the thread and keep y'all posted.

seiji• 18 years ago

"bump the thread" doesn't work here, but would a version of it be useful? Should a story's comment activity over the past X hours be a factor in how it ranks?

zack2• 18 years ago

Yes, as well as its recent upvote activity.

Zev• 18 years ago

He could always post and link to it when submitting a story. Or just use a new story completely and link to this as a reference for the "why"

jmtame• 18 years ago

I started having weird dreams while I worked for 72 (almost consecutive) hours on some coding projects. I started having these weird dreams about robots assembling themselves and teaching each other how to subclass their own classes. It was weird as hell.

But yeah, I could see how the brain could change neurologically for math.

trominos• 18 years ago

That happens to me occasionally when I work really hard on something. A couple of years ago I was doing math almost constantly for a few weeks, and by the end I was dreaming about problems every night. I felt like I was going insane, since after I started having those dreams I was thinking about math almost continually.

Dreaming about something usually indicates that I'm about to get a lot better at it, though, so it's kind of nice.

startingup• 18 years ago

I have seen some Bangladeshi immigrants in Japan speaking Japanese fluently. They got to Japan well in their twenties. Necessity, mother & invention come to mind.

robg• 18 years ago

Beware of the causal claims. Sure, kids and adults rely, to differing extents, on different regions. That's true of almost every domain. Real world pressures - active and passive learning - are influencing the activity and connectivity patterns throughout life. For instance, older individuals compensate for decreased brain functioning by shifting activation to other, supporting regions. Folks are reluctant to call that "reorganization". It's a change in activation (as this study shows) without a clear change in structure (which this study doesn't appear to show).

Here's a good review of recent number work: http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds/pdfs/feigenson2004.pdf

Another involving specifically the parietal cortex: http://www.unicog.org/publications/HubbardPiazzaPinelDehaene...

Andreas Nieder and Earl Miller have also shown some really cool effects for how number relies on specific response properties of individual neurons in non-human primates:

http://web.mit.edu/ekmiller/Public/www/miller/Publications/N...

RyanGWU82• 18 years ago

For some reason I read this headline as "Rails Reorganizes To Make Room For Merb."

Guess I need to lay off the eggnog.

Brain Reorganizes To Make Room For Math

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