"Do you believe in art people?"

"Do you believe in science people?"

"Do you believe in writing people?"

Of course there are "math people". To suggest otherwise is ridiculous, and continues the misleading and often false trend that everything that can be understood about a person can be gleaned from an fMRI. The more I learn about neuroscience (and I know a lot, to be fair), the more I hate the field of neuroscience. It is ruining humanity.

That some people are gifted at math is self-evident. That pretty much everyone can perform adequately at arithmetic with practice is also self-evident, just as someone can learn to draw a cat with practice, even if they're not a gifted visual artist. What we're advocating here ("visual learning" at the expense of practice) is going to possibly uplift mediocre math students at the expense of the truly gifted, who need to learn things like algebra and geometry when they're young in order to do real math when they're older. Sure it's frustrating for people who don't like practicing a subject that they lack interest in, but there's no way to learn algebra without drilling it. It's like suggesting that the best way to learn a sport is to only scrimmage against other opponents. That's of course false. You need to practice, practice, and practice certain skills (say, shooting uncontested three pointers for an hour a day). Without drilling, nothing becomes second nature, and without that type of mental "muscle memory", one can never be expected to, say, solve a complex differential equation.

I think there's been a trend of dumbing down education by catering to the mediocre for a few decades now, and sadly, it appears to be accelerating. Article like this, that denigrate both math and humanity, make me sad for the future.

Edit: I should qualify my statement. I despise behavioral neuroscience and "neuropsychology". They are behaviorism masquerading as something legit, when it should have been debunked decades ago. New language. New tools. Old ideas.