ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Origins of the brain networks for advanced mathematics in expert mathematicians.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 116 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
116 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Occupational Neuroplasticity in the Human Brain: A Critical Review and Meta-Analysis of Neuroimaging Studies.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2020Pooled it
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- Low-dimensional and optimised representations of high-level information in the expert brain.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Functional network activation during a subtraction task.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Regions in the human inferior temporal gyrus are engaged in numerosity processing across visual stimulus categories.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- Individual Brain Charting: fifth release of high-resolution fMRI data for cognitive mapping.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Decision Dynamics in Early Numerical Estimation: Evidence from the Dual-NLET and Drift Diffusion Modeling.Journal of Intelligence · 2026Article
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- The neurobiology of human sequential signal prediction: Insights from language, music, and mathematics.Neuroscience research · 2026Review
- From shape to number: Shape-from-dots homogeneity boosts groupitizing enumeration.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Learning to Program "Recycles" Preexisting Frontoparietal Population Codes of Logical Algorithms.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Mapping Postictal Aphasia through Signal Complexity: A Stereo-Electroencephalography Study.Annals of neurology · 2025Article
- An information-theoretic foreshadowing of mathematicians' sudden insights.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Efficient neural encoding as revealed by bilingualism.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Distinct neural representational geometries of numerosity in early visual and association regions across visual streams.Communications biology · 2025Article
- A causal relationship between functional connectivity of brain networks and cardiovascular disease: A Mendelian randomization study.Medicine · 2025Article
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- Contributions of the multiple demand network to emergent and skilled reading.Scientific reports · 2025Article
56 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Abstract
The origins of human abilities for mathematics are debated: Some theories suggest that they are founded upon evolutionarily ancient brain circuits for number and space and others that they are grounded in language competence. To evaluate what brain systems underlie higher mathematics, we scanned professional mathematicians and mathematically naive subjects of equal academic standing as they evaluated the truth of advanced mathematical and nonmathematical statements. In professional mathematicians only, mathematical statements, whether in algebra, analysis, topology or geometry, activated a reproducible set of bilateral frontal, Intraparietal, and ventrolateral temporal regions. Crucially, these activations spared areas related to language and to general-knowledge semantics. Rather, mathematical judgments were related to an amplification of brain activity at sites that are activated by numbers and formulas in nonmathematicians, with a corresponding reduction in nearby face responses. The evidence suggests that high-level mathematical expertise and basic number sense share common roots in a nonlinguistic brain circuit.
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