Is Math Wired Into the Brain From Birth?

Recently I read an article in Discover Magazine about math and the human brain. The article suggested that math is wired into the neurons of your brain from the day you are born. This would mean that math is a natural instinct for humans; it is an interest we are born with. I could see how this would be easily disputed because many people will say that they hate math. The truth is, you may hate math now, but when you were an infant math was interesting and the very basics made some sense to you. By this, I don’t mean that babies are born knowing that 6 multiplied by 9 is 54 but rather that they can connect numbers in other ways.

In one of the studies listed in this article, scientists studied the brains of newborns. They did this by playing cooing sounds to the babies with different numbers of sounds in each trial. Following this, the babies were shown a set of shapes on the computer screen. The scientists measured the amount of time each baby looked at the shapes. Previous studies have shown that the length of a time a baby spends looking at something reflects how interested the baby is in that object or picture in this case. To make this easier to understand, a baby would hear, “tuu, tuu, tuu, tuu, tuu.” Following this, the baby would look longest at the five shapes. They would look somewhat less at the 10 and very little at the 15. This shows that babies do understand the basic meaning of numbers and that they can also connect pictures to sounds.

Interestingly enough, a similar study was conducted on rhesus monkeys that show they too have math on the brain. The studies showed that when moneys do math, they rely on the section of the brain called the intraparietal sulcus. This is the same part of the brain that humans rely on to do math. It also found that the rhesus monkeys had the same basic understanding of math that human babies do. Since humans and monkeys went on a different evolutionary path about 30 million years ago, this proves that this math intuition in our brains is at least that old.

The question that this leaves us then is why aren’t monkeys as intelligent as humans? The author of the article, Carl Zimmer, explains that our ability as humans to understand symbols is what sets us apart. Long ago, humans probably thought of numbers the same way as babies and monkeys do today. Once humans discovered symbols and began to use them the world became a different place.

Here is a link to the article, "The Brain," by Carl Zimmer