h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Certainly ability at maths & music often go together, so I imagine it uses a lot of the similar brain activity.

I've been told musical ability and mathematical reasoning ability go together, but I've still yet to see just *how* they're connected, since once you get past the counting part of music it all goes towards expressive and musical elements.

But then I could just be dense again.

Maths isn't really about numbers. Arithmetic is, and to some extent algebera and obviously calculus. But an awful lot of maths is not about numbers at all. It is about relationships and patterns and interactions.

I suspect that the links between maths and music are more to do with the ability to work with non-visual patterns than with numbers.

Having said that, I got my Music O'Level purely on my mathematical/numerical ability - I was red hot at the theory and completely rubbish at the practical.



Ben

Hmm. That may be it, though. I've taken 2 years of Theory and I noticed it was mathematical in *nature*, but there wasn't a direct correlation which is why I got a bit confused, cause I was trying to treat it like algebra, geometry, trig, and calc.

The mathematics of the performance aspect is more what still mystifies me, mostly cause the emotional end of it all seems to elude any mathematical explaination for me.

well, I was taking the information from various cognitive neurologists (among other sources). it is not unusual for there to be a difference of opinion between different specialities, as they all carry along various (mostly worthless) baggage from their subjects history.

I suspect that pinker is working from a basis of the various stages of developmental psychology that people pass through. this would tend to give different results, because different people move on at different rates.

neurologists have been looking for changes in the brain for many years, and when they see a significant change, they try and figure out what new ability has appeared, or old ability has disappeared.

I suspect that what pinker is finding is the point where it becomes too boring to learn a new language by immersion, rather than the point where you lose the ability to become fluent.

The idea that people get more intellegent as they get older is dependant upon how you define intellegence, if in your definition you allow knowledge or experiance to be attributed to intellegence then naturaly you will find older people more intellegent, however it seems to me that the ammount we learn decreases as we grow older, arguably because we have already learnt so much, possibly because the nature of our society we end up in jobs with for the majority, repetative tasks, but if the facility of learning is your measure of intellegence then I believe it could be argued that we decrease as we grow older. Another aspect that could be attributed to intellegence that seems to me to diminish in the majority with age is imagination.

Math

you don't get more or less intelligent as you get older.

what happens is that you start losing brain cells, and thus the connections between your knowledge start to fail. you get around this by actually using your knowledge, which refreshes the links and causes new dendritic connections to be established.

as long as you activly use your mind, you can make connections faster than they rot. Even better, as you form more and better connections between your knowledge, you find new places to connect your new knowledge, making it even easier to learn new stuff.

as far as we know, there is no limit to what we can learn if the knowledge is available to us.

Yeah Xyroth I agree, but I felt an oposition view to the seeming conclusion that intellegence grows with age.

Math - Enjoying playing devils advocate

Oops I should pay more attention, being in work is no excuse for that sort of incomplete sentance. Sorry, I'll try again.

Yeah Xyroth I agree, but I felt an oposition view to the seeming conclusion that intellegence grows with age needed to be presented.

Math - Looking more foolish each time he checks

I can support the link between algebra and music. I have a bit of an equation fetish - which is why I was put into the top class for maths - but I can't do anything else in the *maths* sphere. Absolutely useless. I am also scarily good at being able to pick up and instrument and learn how to play it fairly easily...I took the Music GCSE on the side after spending about 4 days in total recording the coursework and the practical; took the exam after scanning through the notes, and pulled the same grade (a C) as the people who had been studying it for 2 years. Perhaps it is all linked? I've never much been bothered with music though...more of a writer. But that achievement was quite a suprising one. Especially after the music teacher told me "You should have studied more" after the exam...

Hehe.

Um. I disagree completely with the idea that intelligence fades with age...

I agree with Xyroth - as I'm well past my peak number of brain cells, I'm working on the 'use it or lose it' principle!

I think the thing is intelligence CHANGES as you get older. I can't hold lots of things in my mind at the same time the way I could thirty years ago, but my powers of reasoning and my ability to link things together has grown over the same period. Slower but deeper, which is apparently the normal course of development.

Noggin

i reckon reasoning and stuff get better with age as most situations requiring reasoning the older person would have encountered and solved once before.

like the really good chess players. they would have seen their opponent's moves in previous games and remember what works against them, rather than working it all out from scratch.

which is why anyone can be a good chess player. it's all about the number of games you've played.

I thought that the problem with intelligence tests is that they are designed with a specific and rather out-moded definition of what is intelligence. Aren't there now acknowledged forms of intelligence such as 'mechanical intelligence' and 'musical intelligence' and 'emotional intelligence'? (Though the latter may just be a self-help book! ).

One example of a flawed early IQ test question was 'if a body which has been strangled, stabbed and shot in the head has fallen down stairs, and the police say it is an accidental death, are they right?' (I am paraphrasing). Now the answer to this depends on where you come from. If you come from a police state, then the most intelligent thing is to say 'yes they are right'.

Most IQ tests I have done seem to test maths and logic based in mathematical context. A lot of people cannot work out logic in a maths-based context nearly as well as if you were to ask the same questions about ordering drinks in a bar, or some other human or social context.

Ben

Ooh! Nice bit of psychology there Ben. That all relates to personal interest...to be basic (because I am not getting out my textbook at this time of night)...humans are more likely to take an interest in a problem that involves social rules and things that benefit them...than just a random bunch of numbers that has not relativity to the individual.

Ok. So maybe it was a loose link. And completely off topic. But I'll post it anyway.

Hey - lose links are what this site is all about.

Viva la Drift!

Ben

I think the maths/music link is about the similarity in recognising patterns.

But being knowledgable about music theory, or having the eye/finger coordination to perform a piece accurately from sheet music has no correlation to, say, writing evocative lyrics, or shaping people's emotions using music, or tying music in with other media such as film for a certain effect on the audience, or ..

And similarly, being good at maths has no correlation to being able to socialise well with one's peers.

Usually when you are exceptionally talented, you are incredibly anti-social.

Of course, that is a completely subjective opinion