Cortical circuits for mathematical knowledge: evidence for a major subdivision within the brain's semantic networks

Abstract

Is mathematical language similar to natural language? Are language areas used by mathematicians when they do mathematics? And does the brain comprise a generic semantic system that stores mathematical knowledge alongside knowledge of history, geography or famous people? Here, we refute those views by reviewing three functional MRI studies of the representation and manipulation of high-level mathematical knowledge in professional mathematicians. The results reveal that brain activity during professional mathematical reflection spares perisylvian language-related brain regions as well as temporal lobe areas classically involved in general semantic knowledge. Instead, mathematical reflection recycles bilateral intraparietal and ventral temporal regions involved in elementary number sense. Even simple fact retrieval, such as remembering that 'the sine function is periodical' or that 'London buses are red', activates dissociated areas for math versus non-math knowledge. Together with other fMRI and recent intracranial studies, our results indicated a major separation between two brain networks for mathematical and non-mathematical semantics, which goes a long way to explain a variety of facts in neuroimaging, neuropsychology and developmental disorders.This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The origins of numerical abilities'.

What Expertise Can Tell About Mathematical Learning and Cognition

“…Finally, when asked to verify whether a complex mathematical statement is true, false, or makes no sense, mathematicians display the activation of a bilateral network including prefrontal, parietal, and inferior temporal areas, without activating language‐related areas situated in the left hemisphere. This has led to the suggestion that advanced mathematical reasoning might be coupled with a network responsible for the processing of numerical and spatial information rather than linguistic processing (Amalric & Dehaene, , ).…”

A Domain-general Cognitive Core defined in Multimodally Parcellated Human Cortex

“…for reasoning MD activation: Duncan, 2000; Watson and Chatterjee, 2012). Math>Story was added because previous results show a strong MD-like activation pattern associated with arithmetic processing (Amalric and Dehaene, 2017, 2016). For working memory and relational reasoning, stimuli were visual, whereas for Math>Story, stimuli were auditory.…”

Neural Processing Mechanism of Mental Calculation Based on Cerebral Oscillatory Changes: A Comparison Between Abacus Experts and Novices

“…Taking into account of temporal profiles of oscillatory changes in the first experimental paradigm, we concluded that non-experts might use serial processing; in contrast, experts may utilize parallel processing (see Supplementary Figures S11, S12). We could propose calculation processing in both abacus expert and non-experts based on our new findings and some previous studies (Hanakawa et al, 2002(Hanakawa et al, , 2003Arsalidou and Taylor, 2011;Tanaka et al, 2012;Pinel and Dehaene, 2013;Amalric and Dehaene, 2017). In non-experts, from 75 ms visual processing of presented numbers start in the bilateral medial occipital, then from 150 ms figurative cognition of numbers in the inferior temporal Pinel et al, 1999) and numeric processing in the bilateral IPS Cohen et al, 2000;Rickard et al, 2000;Kazui et al, 2000;Bugden et al, 2019), from 200 ms inner speech in the left IFG , from 250 ms working memory in the DLPFC (Rickard et al, 2000), and finally from 400 ms addition with carrying in the IPS starts.…”