

Brain Reorganizes To Make Room For Math - pg
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/38793/title/Brain_reorganizes_to_make_room_for_math?

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robg
Beware of the causal claims. Sure, kids and adults rely, to differing extents,
on different regions. That's true of almost every domain. Real world pressures
- active and passive learning - are influencing the activity and connectivity
patterns throughout life. For instance, older individuals compensate for
decreased brain functioning by shifting activation to other, supporting
regions. Folks are reluctant to call that "reorganization". It's a change in
activation (as this study shows) without a clear change in structure (which
this study doesn't appear to show).

Here's a good review of recent number work:
<http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds/pdfs/feigenson2004.pdf>

Another involving specifically the parietal cortex:
[http://www.unicog.org/publications/HubbardPiazzaPinelDehaene...](http://www.unicog.org/publications/HubbardPiazzaPinelDehaene_InteractionsNumberSpace_NatRevNeurosci2005.pdf)

Andreas Nieder and Earl Miller have also shown some really cool effects for
how number relies on specific response properties of individual neurons in
non-human primates:

[http://web.mit.edu/ekmiller/Public/www/miller/Publications/N...](http://web.mit.edu/ekmiller/Public/www/miller/Publications/Nieder_Miller_PNAS2004.pdf)

[http://web.mit.edu/ekmiller/Public/www/miller/Publications/N...](http://web.mit.edu/ekmiller/Public/www/miller/Publications/NiederMiller2004JCognNeurosci.pdf)

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jmtame
I started having weird dreams while I worked for 72 (almost consecutive) hours
on some coding projects. I started having these weird dreams about robots
assembling themselves and teaching each other how to subclass their own
classes. It was weird as hell.

But yeah, I could see how the brain could change neurologically for math.

~~~
trominos
That happens to me occasionally when I work really hard on something. A couple
of years ago I was doing math almost constantly for a few weeks, and by the
end I was dreaming about problems every night. I felt like I was going insane,
since after I started having those dreams I was thinking about math almost
continually.

Dreaming about something usually indicates that I'm about to get a lot better
at it, though, so it's kind of nice.

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tokenadult
It will be a good follow-up area of research to see how much of that brain
reorganization from early childhood to adulthood can be influenced by
experience, that is by good education. Here's a link

[http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-
Mathematic...](http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematics-
Understanding/dp/0805829091/)

to a very informative book about math education and how it can be better. I
strongly suspect the brain reorganization happens better and faster for
learners with good math teachers rather than lousy math teachers.

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startingup
I have seen some Bangladeshi immigrants in Japan speaking Japanese fluently.
They got to Japan well in their twenties. Necessity, mother & invention come
to mind.

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RyanGWU82
For some reason I read this headline as "Rails Reorganizes To Make Room For
Merb."

Guess I need to lay off the eggnog.

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mixmax
Intresting. This also indicates that teaching kids math is a good idea.

~~~
newt0311
Teaching kids almost anything (worth teaching) is a good idea. By the time
kids grow over 10, large portions of their learning abilities are gone. For
example, consider languages. Kids growing up with multiple languages learn
them with ease, but for most adults, learning a foreign language is nearly
impossible.

The early years are a person's best chance to expand their minds.

~~~
tokenadult
It's an open area of research (mentioned in some recent HN threads, in fact)
whether all areas of learning have the same plasticity in adult life. It does
appear, in the interest of efficiency in using language, perhaps, that
language learning plasticity drops sharply after puberty. (Although I got good
enough in Chinese to work for many years as a Chinese-English interpreter,
even though I didn't start learning the language until age seventeen.) On the
other hand, a lot of other skills can be learned to very high levels indeed
after surprisingly late starts.

Children also need time to play, and maybe one of the most important things
start-up entrepreneurs can figure out is forms of play for children that
bolster or increase their plasticity for learning what they need to learn as
they grow up.

~~~
nostrademons
There was a hypothesis in Steven Pinker's _The Language Instinct_ that
children's ability to learn languages is not an innate, magical part of being
a child. Rather, it's because learning languages is _hard_ , and so people
will avoid doing so whenever they have a choice. Everyone learns a first
language because otherwise they can't communicate. People who have to speak
one language at home and one at school (or a language with one parent and a
different language with another parent) end up speaking two languages. But the
reason people don't learn languages late in life isn't that they can't: it's
that they don't need to, and their attention can be better spent on other
things.

My dad spoke and sang to me a little bit in Chinese when I was a toddler, but
it never stuck. I suspect this is because I could always revert to English and
he'd talk back to me in English, so there was no reason for me to learn
Chinese. Some of my cousins - the ones whose parents were more strict about
speaking Chinese at home - did end up picking it up.

Similarly, this also explains why immersion works, why immigrant ghettoes
prevent language acquisition, and why people retain accents. If you're dropped
in a foreign culture and have to learn the language to survive, you'll manage
it whether you're 10 or 60. If you have other people who speak your language
that you can depend on, there's much less reason to learn a foreign language.
And if you can speak well enough to be understand (as most people with accents
can), there's no reason to improve that last 10% (which, in true 90-10 form,
takes 90% of the effort) to make yourself sound like a native speaker.

~~~
whacked_new
There's more to this.

Toddlers are not inclined to perform tasks that are _hard_. So, they don't
really make a choice about learning a language or not, neither is it based on
necessity: before and after language acquisition, a baby would receive
attention and protection. Before anyone says anything about reinforcement,
kids with delayed language development (up to around 7) can be mute for years
regardless of any coaxing. This is a special case though -- the brain seems to
delay its pruning, almost as if to "wait" for the speech centers to kick into
gear when speech begins.

Toddlers are _innately_ imitative. Speech acquisition can be viewed as an
imitative behavior, akin to, say, reaching out and grabbing something, kicking
a ball, what not. The remarkable thing is that by observing something
happening, they know how to control the analogous functions in their own
bodies. I mention this as an alternative to this "necessity to communicate"
idea: it could be largely the result of imitation, with the ability to
communicate as a byproduct.

Finally, early languages take precedence over later languages. It could be
because the early development of concrete operations, and later, abstract
thought, rely on the available (i.e. first/native) language to "bootstrap"
more complex thought processes. So the first language gets used non-stop. Then
the second language comes in. Let's say you study it as an adult, and work
real hard on it. When we fire a neural signal though, the wirings for the
first language are so much stronger that they enjoy a lopsided privilege in
access speed. In this sense, the later languages will never quite equal the
earlier ones, by far.

So while I'm not saying anything against the adult ability of new language
acquisition (and by this I mean a different set of phonemes and grammar -- in-
family languages like Italian to Spanish won't count), I would say there is
something quite magical about the child learning their first language(s).

~~~
nostrademons
How do bilingual native speakers (i.e. learn multiple first languages) fit
into this? Or people who're immersed in a second language early on, eg. my
dad's a native Cantonese speaker, but he went to dual Chinese (Mandarin) and
English schools where all instruction was in those languages, and so he speaks
all three with minimal accent.

~~~
whacked_new
If memory serves, there are different levels native multilingualism. If you
learned multiple languages in parallel, they end up sharing space on the
neural structure. I would believe this is "true" multilingualism.

If you learned one separately from another, after the first was stable
already, the new language will occupy an adjacent region (somehow I think this
is because the region is still growing).

All languages will be functionally native (assuming early enough acquisition
and abundant practice for all), but in the latter case, you would still expect
a slightly weaker signal for the later languages. But in both cases, I would
just count all native-level languages as first languages, taking "minimal
accent" as the litmus test (some people slip through, and in my experience
those people had amazing ears and were gifted with languages in general).

This is just anecdote, but from all my friends who have began learning English
at a different age, their accents seem to follow a general pattern of later
acquisition -> stronger accent. While this seems obvious, for those who
learned English around 12-14, you get an interesting effect of native-level
fluency, but just at certain places, you can tell it isn't their first
language. And usually, at least for my friends, you can tell about what age
they started learning.

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zack
I'm taking a class on psychological development of mathematics in children
next quarter. I'll bump the thread and keep y'all posted.

~~~
seiji
"bump the thread" doesn't work here, but would a version of it be useful?
Should a story's comment activity over the past X hours be a factor in how it
ranks?

~~~
Zev
He could always post and link to it when submitting a story. Or just use a new
story completely and link to this as a reference for the "why"

