Did Your Brain Pre-Determine Your Math Scores?
Is there a difference between the hemispheres of your grey matter?
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According to the left brain/right brain theory, I am fully justified in believing that algebra was made up in large part to make life miserable for about half of the students in high school. Contrary to the unyielding insistence of Mrs. Maxwell, I refused to believe that you could multiply letters of the alphabet. Mrs. Maxwell had issues with this, resulting in the placing of letters farther down the alphabet than the letter “C” on my report card.
This, I thought, was discrimination against right-brained people who know how to spell words and diagram sentences and use correct English but who remain unable to understand stuff like “the square of the hypoteneuse equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides.” You can thank Pythagoras for that one but I’ll pass.
Truth be told, I actually like mathematics. It’s just that I like it in theory but not in practice. I am amazed by astronomical precision but unable to balance my checkbook and still count on my fingers up to ten. One of my heroes is Isaac Newton. If brains were like mountains, Isaac Newton’s brain would be Mount Everest and the Canadian Rockies combined, together with the Andes Mountains and the Matterhorn thrown in to top it off.
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Newton was one of the few minds who drove the Scientific Revolution in the 17th Century, giving birth to the scientific method of observing, questioning, testing, experimenting and evaluating. It was Newton who first discovered the calculus and formulated the laws of motion and gravity. And he was humble enough to say “if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
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One of my favorite books is “Hamlet’s Mill” by Giorgio de Santillana in which he makes the case that mathematics originated before the invention of writing, long before the dawn of history. Early peoples around the world saw the same movements in the night sky and over many hundreds of years began to calculate the return of certain orbits and patterns. They started recording these cycles by cutting notches in animal bones and antlers and much later by building stone circles and aligning temples with events on the horizon.
The concept of number thus became a core factor in keeping track of time and in making intelligent civilization possible. Time was the preponderant factor and led to the evolution of spatial measure.
Long before the invention of writing, mythical stories were the only way ancient people had of passing along a record of celestial events to succeeding generations. Hamlet’s Mill reveals how myth does that. Be warned that it’s not an easy read. (Forgive me but de Santillana is somewhat pedantic.)
The “mill” in Hamlet’s Mill, by the way, was that great, cosmic grinding wheel of the precession of the equinoxes, whereby the earth’s polar axis revolves in a circle (much like a spinning top rotates) completing the cycle every 25,920 years. This knowledge was not available to everybody, just to the shamans and priests. Few of us are aware of it even now, including current shamans and priests.
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Your brain does have two hemispheres. Both work harmoniously to run your body’s machine and to create thought. Some have observed that mathematical ability and artistic talent are weighted differently in the respective hemispheres. I can tell you, however, that Mrs. Maxwell had no truck with any right-brained inability to do algebra. And she may have been exactly right.
The brains of Albert Einstein and N.C. Wyeth operated in radically different ways with what I suspect was virtually the same level of intelligence. Was Bertrand Russell’s IQ higher than T.S. Eliot’s? Was Shakespere dumber than Copernicus?
The notion that the two hemispheres of your brain exhibit different talents is interesting but not scientifically established. I only bring it up to explain my theory of why my brain won’t let me do long division or multiply letters of the alphabet.
Indeed, Pure mathematics seems almost magical. By allowing people to piece out the workings of the Universe it does what great poetry expresses only verbally. That human beings had learned mathematics from observing the heavens and telling stories many thousands of years ago eliminates any need for “ancient aliens” and demonstrates a harmony between the two halves of the brain. We had our Einsteins and Shakesperes back then, despite our not knowing who they were.
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So you can actually love mathematics even if you can’t do it because it is not at all dry and boring but rich in history and understanding. Some of our contemporary mathematicians are doing work that hardly any non-physicist can comprehend but then Pythagoras and Keppler didn’t do anything different in their own time.
One of the math geniuses of our time was the late Richard Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, for his work in the development of quantum electrodynamics. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal Physics World, he was ranked the seventh-greatest physicist of all time.
Of all time!
Feynman was a genius even though his IQ was only 124, which is one of the reasons he is high on my list. Both hemispheres of his brain seemed to be working at top speed because he also had a tremendous sense of humor. He shared this with generations of his students and in his several books.
There are two types of genius. Ordinary geniuses do great things, but they leave you room to believe that you could do the same if only you worked hard enough.
Then there are magicians, and you can have no idea how they do it. Feynman was a magician.
—Hans Bethe
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