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Comment by florbnit | Hacker News Reader

> It think this is silly on multiple accounts. I'll claim that there's not real thing such as a "language brain" or "math brain."

It seems plainly obvious that this language just means “areas of brain that activate when dealing with math problems” vs “areas of brain that activate when dealing with language problems” and yes there is hard evidence that there is a difference between them.

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Please reread my comment in full. I'm willing to bet we disagree on the definition of math. I'll strongly insist that the one I'm using is common among mathematicians. If you'd like to retort by saying it's about semantics then congrats, we're on the same page (and can be verified by reading you sibling comments and/or my replies to some of them)

It has nothing to do with the definition of math. If you put people in an MRI and give them random problems then you’ll notice a distribution in the patterns of brain activity that are distinct. Some of these groupings we’ll call “math like” because the problems are more like mathematics than linguistics. And in the other distribution we’ll call them “word like” because the problems fall into the category we associate with word problems.

The fact that we see separate patterns of brain activity is the interesting part not any semantic argument about what you or mathematicians feel should be defined as being math or not.

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