MONDAY, April 12, 2004 (HealthDayNews) -- A new study seems to sum up why math whizzes are better with numbers than other people.
The joint U.S.-Australian study found that mathematically gifted teenagers performed better than their average-ability peers and college students on tests that required cooperation between the left and right sides of the brain.
The study included 60 right-handed males. Eighteen (average age just under 14) were mathematically gifted, 18 (average age just over 13) had average math ability, and 24 were college students (average age 20).
Only males were selected for the study. Boys are six to 13 times more likely than girls to be mathematically gifted, according to the researchers.
The study participants viewed letter patterns flashed on the left or right sides of a computer screen. The boys had to indicate whether the patterns matched or not. These tests indicate which side of a person's brain processes different kinds of visual information and how well both sides of the brain work together.
Mathematically gifted boys showed more interaction and cooperation between the two sides of the brain than the average teens and college students, who did better on tasks that required a single side of the brain to process information.
The results support the theory that the brains of mathematically gifted people are better at relaying and integrating information between the cerebral hemispheres.
"It's not that you have a special math module somewhere in your brain, but rather that the brain's particular functional organization -- which allows right-hemisphere contributions to be better integrated into the overall cognitive/behavioral equation -- predisposes it towards the use of high-level imagery and spatial skills, which in turn just happen to be very useful when it comes to doing math reasoning," study co-author Michael O'Boyle of the University of Melbourne said in a prepared statement.
More information
The U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke has more about the brain.
