During the schooling stage, there is a crucial time when children stop using their fingers and begin to do head counts. What happens in our brain to acquire this ability? How is a mathematical mind formed?
This is what neuroscientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine have asked themselves, who have performed MRIs on children, adolescents and adults while solving arithmetic problems.
The experts found that in older children the area of the hippocampus , linked to memories, was more activated and the prefrontal and parietal cortex, neural areas related to the act of counting, less. That is to say, as we get older we increasingly turn to memory for mathematics.
However, in the case of adolescents and adults, the neocortex was working at full capacity , where the information stored throughout life in the mature brain is based.
According to Vinod Menon, principal investigator of the study, "this means that the hippocampus provides a kind of scaffold during childhood to learn and consolidate data in long-term memory."
The scientists hope that the conclusions of their research serve to alleviate the innate difficulty of some students with the dreaded "math".
