What does a crowded bus have to do with your ability to learn math? If you can tell by a quick glance whether more people are in the front or the back, chances are you had an easier time with numbers in school, a new study reveals.Success in mathematics has already been linked to factors such as short-term memory. Many experts also suspected a role for the approximate number system (ANS), a sort of mental sense that allows us to judge the relative quantities of various objects, such as people in the front or back of a bus. But no one had studied the extent to which this ability varies in people, or whether it relates to math proficiency.
Cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene of INSERM in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, calls the experiment a "beautiful demonstration" of the link between the ANS and mathematical ability. Still, he notes that the study only shows a relationship between ANS and high math scores; it doesn't prove that one causes the other. Halberda says his team is now following a group of children to help answer that question.
