Brain changes key to learning math in kids

Do you panic when you have to solve math problems? Blame your brain!
A precisely orchestrated group of brain changes, many involving the memory centre known as the hippocampus, play a crucial role in helping kids learn math, researchers, including one of Indian-origin, have found.
"We wanted to understand how children acquire new knowledge, and determine why some children learn to retrieve facts from memory better than others," said Vinod Menon, senior author of the study.
Children use certain brain regions, including the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, very differently from adults when the two groups are solving the same types of math problems, according to the study by Stanford University School of Medicine researchers.

"It was surprising to us that the hippocampal and prefrontal contributions to memory-based problem-solving during childhood don't look anything like what we would have expected for the adult brain," said postdoctoral scholar Shaozheng Qin, the research paper's lead author.
In the study, 28 children solved simple math problems while receiving two functional magnetic resonance imaging brain scans; the scans were done about 1.2 years apart.

The researchers also scanned 20 adolescents and 20 adults at a single time point. At the start of the study, the children were aged 7-9.
During the study, as the children aged from an average of 8.2 to 9.4 years, they became faster and more accurate at solving math problems, and relied more on retrieving math facts from memory and less on counting.

As these shifts in strategy took place, the researchers saw several changes in the children's brains. The hippocampus, a region with many roles in shaping new memories, was activated more in children's brains after one year.
Regions involved in counting, including parts of the prefrontal and parietal cortex, were activated less.
The scientists also saw changes in the degree to which the hippocampus was connected to other parts of children's brains, with several parts of the prefrontal, anterior temporal cortex and parietal cortex more strongly connected to the hippocampus after one year.
The stronger these connections, the greater was each individual child's ability to retrieve math facts from memory, a finding that suggests a starting point for future studies of math-learning disabilities.

The research was published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.