During the stage of schooling, there is a crucial moment in which children stop using their fingers and begin to make 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, who have performed magnetic resonances on children, adolescents and adults while solving arithmetic problems.
The experts found that in older children the area of the hippocampus was activated, linked to the memories, and less the prefrontal and parietal cortex, neural zones related to the act of counting. That is to say, as we turn years we turn more and more to memory for mathematics.
However, in the case of adolescents and adults, the neocortex functioned at full capacity, where the information stored throughout the life of the mature brain is stored.
According to Vinod Menon, principal investigator of the study, "this means that the hippocampus provides during childhood a kind of scaffolding to learn and consolidate the data in memory long term."
