Video games are just exercises in the kind of cognitive survival skills honed over millions of years of evolution. That's why maths does not come as easily as speaking a language, although the latter is incomparably more complicated than doing elementary maths." But maths is a recent activity - numbers are at most 10,000 years old - so the brain did not evolve to think that way. "The brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to cope with problems in the physical and social worlds. The brain is no different," says Keith Devlin, executive director at the centre for the study of language and information at Stanford University, California, and author of The Maths Gene. "Anyone who has exercised knows that if you want to make a muscle stronger you have to subject it to strain, to push it beyond its comfort level. Prof Kawashima's findings are not a great surprise to the professionals. There are 30,000 students and 500 study centres in Britain alone. Over the last 40 years, more than seven million children have used Kumon worksheets and there are centres in North America, Europe, Australia and the Far East. Kumon is a maths teaching system devised in 1954 by a teacher called Toru Kumon to help his son. He tested his results both with magnetic resonance imaging, and positron emission tomography, and, he told the Kumon audience, went on to show that addition and subtraction actually did more for growing brains than listening to music or listening to text read aloud.
This challenged received wisdom, which reserves the left hemisphere of the brain for methodical stuff like maths, and the right hemisphere for so-called creative thinking. But even simple mathematical operations stimulated activity in both left and right hemispheres of the frontal lobe. He told the conference, organised by Kumon Educational UK, that the Nintendo games kept busy the parts of the brain associated with vision and movement.
So he set the control children a simple arithmetic exercise called the Kraepelin test, a favourite with psychologists. But experiments such as these call for some kind of comparison.
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