Understanding math not tied to sight: study

Blindness is no barrier to understanding math, according to researchers. Researchers at Johns Hopkins compared brain activity among a group of congenitally blind individuals and a group of sighted individuals and asked all participants to solve a series of math problems and language comprehension tasks.

Mathematical concepts are often framed in a way that tapped into the brain's visual system. Though children might be asked to count the apples in a picture, or imagine two trains speeding away from one another at different speeds, but just how much visual experience shaped the way that people think about numbers was a moot point.

The researchers compared brain activity among a group of congenitally blind individuals and a group of sighted individuals and asked all participants to solve a series of math problems and language comprehension tasks.

''Across all humans, numerical thinking is supported by similar areas in the brain,'' said Shipra Kanjlia, a graduate student in psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University, and the lead author of a paper that resulted from the experiment, The Atlantic reported.

''Does this change in people who have dramatically different perceptual experience - like people who have been blind their whole lives and have never seen the number of people at a party or the number of flowers in a field?''

In both groups who participated in the study, the same parts of the brain showed greater activity which suggested that the ways in which humans processed math concepts developed the same way regardless of visual experience.

The researchers further found that the visual cortex in blind people was highly involved in doing math, suggesting the brain was vastly more adaptable than earlier believed, sciencedaily.com reported in a post, reprinted from materials provided by Johns Hopkins University. 

"The number network develops totally independently of visual experience," said Kanjlia. "These blind people have never seen anything in their lives, but they have the same number network as people who can see."

The findings are published online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.