What Counts: How Every Brain is Hardwired for Math

Much has been written about our innate language sense and how it has shaped our evolution and our nature, but until now little has been known about what Brian Butterworth calls our "numerosity, " an innate number sense as fundamental to our human nature as language. Indeed, the author argues, to explore human nature at all it is necessary to explore the numerosity of the human brain. Is there a math gene? Butterworth's research strongly suggests there is. Do men and women count differently? What is a mathematical prodigy? Why do some people count on their fingers? Are our methods of teaching math effective or not -- and why? No book has authoritatively answered these intriguing questions before now. Butterworth's unique expertise in both mathematics and psychology has enabled him to write a trailblazing work on our understanding of the mathematical brain that shows why counting is fundamental to our lives and how we comprehend the world. With an engaging and accessible style, What Counts will become as important to mathematics as Stephen Pinker's and Noam Chomsky's writings are to language.

At first glance, neuropsychologist Brian Butterworth's What Counts: How Every Brain Is Hardwired for Math might infuriate mathphobes who insist that they just can't get a handle on numbers. Could it be true that natural selection produced brains preprogrammed with multiplication tables? Read a few pages, though, and you'll see that Professor Butterworth has more than a little sympathy for the arithmetically challenged, and indeed confesses that he too has a hard time with figures. His thesis isn't that we are born doing math, but that we are born with a faculty for learning math, much like our ability to learn language. He goes on to argue that unique individual differences in this faculty combine with our educational experiences to make us either lightning calculators or klutzes who can't figure tips.

Butterworth's style is perfect for his subject, seamlessly weaving scholarly analysis with down-to-earth humor and practical examples that will satisfy the researcher and the lay reader alike. Drawing on archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, and his own neuropsychology, he makes his case like a masterful attorney while remaining careful to leave room for scientific falsification. The history of counting is engrossing and will be new to many readers, as it has been a rather arcane field until recently--but it's just one of the many new vistas opened for the readers of What Counts. --Rob Lightner