Transcription
Ever thought about what happens to your brain when you study mathematics?
In a study in 2016, researchers studied the brains of 30 well-educated adults by putting them in an MRI machine. 15 of them were advanced mathematicians while the other 15 were professionals in fields of humanities like history, linguistics, and philosophy, but without any professional mathematical training. The main thing that participants had to do was to listen to statements that were read out loud which could be about general knowledge like history or nature or about math. The math statements came from various fields like analysis, algebra, geometry and topology. All the statements whether general or mathematical matched each other in length and complexity.
The participants had to determine whether each statement was true, false, or meaningless. Meaningless meaning that they were grammatically correct, but made no sense.
As might be expected, mathematicians scored high on the correctness of mathematical statements. While the controls, in other words, the non-mathematicians, that's what we will call them here, controls, were close to chance in guessing whether a mathematical statement was correct or not. In non-math questions, the two groups scored pretty much the same. Mathematicians of course also scored higher in being able to quickly tell whether a statement in mathematics made sense no matter whether it's true or false. And both groups had similar scores for non-math questions. Again, this is totally expected.
But the point here is not to compare their knowledge on math and general subjects, but to show how the brain responded when it came to the other types of questions. And finally, once a participant has recognized that a statement is meaningful, this D tells us how well they could decide if it was actually true or false. The answers were exactly what we would expect. Mathematicians were pretty good at answering everything and the controls or non-mathematicians couldn't make much sense of the math statements, but they did score well in the general statements.
So, what what's so special about it? Well, let's see how their brains responded. First, the brain builds a unique network for math. Look at this graph measuring the brain regions called left inferior temporal and left intraaral. The thick white line on the x-axis marks when a sentence was being read to the control group. While the rest of the x-axis shows how activity in these regions changed while they thought about the problem. The lines on the graph itself represent activation in these areas when the control group was thinking about meaningful sentences in each topic. The topics being analysis, algebra, topology, geometry, and non-math. As you can see, the responses to all topics, math and non-math were mild and similar, showing that these regions weren't strongly specialized for mathematics in their brains.
Now look at the mathematicians while hearing math statements in any field whether analysis, algebra, topology or geometry cause a clear and sustained rise in activation in these brain areas. But non-math statements shift to other brain regions specialized for general knowledge. In controls, these same regions showed only mild and similar responses to all statements whether math or non-math indicating no activation in math specific areas.
So basically for both math and non-math the controls lean on the same general purpose language heavy areas. That's why the activation looks similar across all topics. They are processing it with the same general reasoning network. Mathematicians though when it comes to math strongly recruit the mathsp specific parietal frontal network. For non-math they don't even use this network. They shift over to language and general semantic regions. Basically even though there is more nuance to this explanation the scans show that the green areas which are part of the brain's general semantic network in other words responsible for language and communication lit up in both groups when they thought about general knowledge questions. When the control group was thinking about the math statements, the same green areas lit up. When mathematicians thought about math statements, a different set of regions which are shown in blue, the math specialized network became active instead.
The takeaway then is that mathematicians have a math specialized network that is distinct from general semantic processing. You may say that maybe mathematicians brains looked different just because the math questions were harder for the controls or for the non-mathematicians not because of any special network. It was found that the difficulty of the math problem has nothing to do with the activation of the region. As you can see on these graphs, the math specialized network was always activated for both easy and difficult math problems. while a completely different general semantic network was activated for non-math questions whether easy or hard. This rules out the maybe they were just thinking harder explanation and it confirms that these brain areas are content specific.
If you're finding value in this video, please do not forget to like it and to subscribe to the channel. Now we saw earlier that mathematicians have certain brain areas in blue that activate more for math than for non-math. That's a domain distinction. It shows that there is a separation between math network and general semantic network.
But this by itself doesn't prove that the math network is actually processing meaning. Hypothetically, those math specific areas could light up for any string of symbols or jargon that looks like mathematics, even if it's nonsense, simply because it's in a math-like form. So, that's why the researchers compared the meaningful math statements with the non-meaningful math statements and found very interesting results. Your brain knows math before you do.
In the graphs, when we look at mathematicians, we see that simply recognizing a sentence as mathematical, even if it's nonsensical, does send the signal to specialized math processing areas in the brain. But when the math statement actually makes sense, those same regions activate more strongly. Those areas work even more. For the control group, though, the pattern is completely different. Whether the statement is math, non-math, meaningful, or meaningless, the same general semantic areas are used. And there's no sign of switching to a math specific network.
This tells us that mathematicians have a neural routing system for mathematical content and that non-mathematthematicians simply don't turn on even when they do recognize that it's math that's being talked about. So to summarize everything we've talked about so far while listening to a statement everyone's language area of the brain is engaged. That's expected. But when it's time to reason about the mathematical statements, mathematicians switch to a dedicated neural math network. The controls don't switch over to this other network. So the language area takes over the task. In controls, the math scans look like gibberish material. A math brain is ready for anything.
An important thing to say is that when the controls were shown Arabic numerals or were asked to perform simple calculations, their math network also lit up. This means that everyone, not only mathematicians, have these neural networks. But there's a catch. Even for this simple arithmetic, mathematicians still lit up the math controlled network more strongly than the controls did.
So what you may say? It's not like there's been proof that this somehow benefits the reasoning outside of mathematics. Well, the scope of this study in particular was to observe how the brain works when it sees math. But there are other studies that are focused on the other question. Does having a more developed math network of the brain actually help you in any way? Well, guess what these other researchers found?
A study from 2020 from the University of Sydney gathered people from low mathematical knowledge to advanced mathematical knowledge. They were given logical reasoning problems, often ones that have to do with everyday life. One of the reasoning tests was the classic way and selection task, which has cards that have a letter on one side and a number on the other. Participants saw four cards, D, K, 3, and 7. The rule was simple. If a card has a D on one side, then it can only have a three on the other side. Your job is to flip the smallest number of cards needed to check if the statement is true or false. The logically correct choice is D and seven. The D checks for the expected three, and the seven checks that there isn't a D hiding on the back. The twist is that most people make the classic error of turning over D and three looking for confirmation instead of trying to falsify the rule, which is usually more powerful and conclusive in mathematical proofs. In any case, after all the tests, the results showed that the greater the mathematical training a person has, the more they answered correctly. Interestingly, their response time, so the amount of time they took to think about the problem also increased, suggesting that they had a pause and consider approach. So overall, the more mathematics a person knows, the more logically they make their decisions and the more they think them through.
These two studies show something important. Learning mathematics totally changes how your brain processes information. And research on logical reasoning shows that the more math you know, the more correctly you reason or the more logically you reason in life. Of course, there are countless other benefits of mathematics from understanding the way the universe is built to making better everyday decisions. This list can be infinite. These are just two of the studies. There are countless other studies that reaffirm the same exact point. A mathtraed brain doesn't just know numbers. It actually thinks differently. It routes problems through very special networks in our brain that most people barely activate. A mathematician is able to resist the urge to guess and instead has a tendency to pause and consider every angle, every perspective. And this way of thinking isn't just confined to equations and mathematical statements. It's a mindset that spills into everyday life. It shows logic, focus, and the capacity of decision-m. In a way, it's like a mental superpower. It rewires your brain to solve problems more effectively. It makes your reasoning more deep and clear. And it helps you to see the world with a sharper lens.
If you want to see the paper that this video is based on, look for it in the description. If you guys enjoyed this video, I'm pretty sure you're going to love this one. Check it out.