Could the key to how good we are at maths be hidden in our brains? Premium

Study links students' math performance to brain anatomy and gene expression, sparking debate on biological vs. environmental factors in learning.

In a scene from The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015), a biopic of the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, G.H. Hardy (played by Jeremy Irons) asks Ramanujan (Dev Patel), “How did you know that theorem?” “It came to me,” Ramanujan says. The scene brought to life a famous aspect of Ramanujan’s mathematical prowess: he just knew the answers to complicated problems and often didn’t explain how he derived them.

Could his biology have given him this amazing ability?

In a study published in the journal Science Advances in May, researchers at Stanford University reported finding a relationship between school students’ performance in mathematical tests and their brain anatomy. The authors also identified genes whose expression correlated, they said, with the students’ ability to do mathematics.

These correlations could be used to predict how much a student’s mathematical proficiency might improve with tuition, the authors added.

The findings have kicked up a storm, but neuroscientists and education researchers caution against reducing complex human abilities to biological readouts.

The researchers scanned the brains of 219 students aged 7-13 years using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). MRI is a non-invasive imaging technique that uses magnetic fields and radio waves to generate detailed images of the body’s internal structures. Then they measured the students’ various mathematical skills, including “arithmetic calculations, number sense, and problem-solving abilities”, Vinod Menon, director of the Stanford Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Laboratory and one of the authors of the study, said.

Their performance in these tests was used to define their “mathematical ability”.