Science Shows Math Gets Easier When You Don't Use Your Fingers to Count

Be honest: Do you still count on your fingers?

If you do, it may help to explain why you struggle in other areas of math. Trouble with long division? Can’t recall those multiplication tables? Yeah, it all leads back to your finger-counting ways.

A study published in Nature Neuroscience found that kids’ brains reorganize themselves when said kids switch from counting on fingers and toes to doing the counting in their heads. The procedure itself moves from living in their short-term memory to finding a home in their long-term memory storage center. Though it seems like a small switch, it can prove helpful in the long run when dealing with more complex mathematical procedures.

One NIH researcher explained that, if a child’s brain doesn’t have to work hard over small things like counting, then it has room to deal with more complex equations in the hippocampus, which deals with short-term memory. Once easier things like counting move into long-term memory, other, harder procedures they learn to process mentally can also move into the long-term memory center. This gives the kids who learn to do mental math earlier an edge over their classmates who keep relying on their external digits for help.

For the study, 28 children between the ages of 7 and 9 were asked to solve math questions while in an MRI. The kids were also tested outside of the machine, to see if they used their fingers or moved their lips to count. A year and a half later, the kids were tested again; overwhelmingly, those who had not used finger-counting were now solving problems faster and more accurately than those who did.

For those of you who may still use your fingers for counting, all hope is pretty much lost. You may as well resign yourself to being a starving artist or gym teacher, because all those non-finger-counting kids you knew in school are beating you in the race to be the next Nobel Prize winner.

[Pic via Flickr - Dion Hinchcliffe]