Researchers Explore What Expertise Looks Like in the Brain
They found significant differences between novice and expertise brain activity.
Hiya!
Problem-solving, especially overcoming challenging issues, has been a trademark talent of our species, probably since we evolved. Even now, it’s so common we rarely pause to consider how remarkable our problem-solving behavior is. After all, challenging problems demand deep concentration to solve, whether a complicated math equation, strategizing a game, or planning your next vacation.
To succeed, you need to come up with and consider various possible scenarios, methods, and approaches. In time, a solution forms bit by bit as information falls into place, the picture becomes focused, and a lightbulb goes off. It may even feel like the answer materializes in your mind — but what’s actually happening in our brain during this process?
The Curiosity
Hanna Poikonen, a senior researcher and lecturer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, has spent her career studying the functions underlying expertise in the brain. In an article she penned in Scientific American about her research, she mentioned the curiosity behind her most recent study (which I’ll tell you about soon):
“[W]e wanted to understand what happens in the brain while a person engages in abstract and demanding thought — so we designed a study involving math expertise.”
Poikonen and her team, which included scientists in Finland and Germany, chose mathematics because the subject relies on one of our oldest brain networks, the parietal regions located at the center and top of the brain’s outer cortex, which helps us process numbers, space, and time.
While reviewing previous research on neurocognition in mathematics, Poikonen noticed the studies focused on brain activity while participants worked out simple problems that only took a few seconds to solve. Such studies are helpful for things like revealing brain activity for our working memory (short-term memory) and during short-term, focused attention, but they don’t provide the information Poikonen wanted.
So, she designed a study using longer, more complex math problems that require multiple steps to solve. Her article describes them as “more akin to the tricky puzzles that mathematicians must tackle regularly.”
The Study
For their study, published in January 2024 by Cereb Cortex, the researchers recruited 44 graduate and undergraduate university students, half of whom studied math or math-related programs like engineering or physics, while the other half had minimal to no involvement with mathematics, such as art and physiotherapy students.
All participants were tested for their verbal, spatial, and numerical intelligence quotients (IQ) and asked to rate their level of math anxiety.
Afterward, they watched presentations that broke down how to solve several challenging math problems step-by-step, like proving a Fibonacci identity, and were encouraged to pay close attention to the demonstrations as they’d be asked to explain the problems later.
The participants wore electroencephalogram (EEG) caps covered with electrodes, which allowed the researchers to noninvasively track the participants’ electrical brain activity as they watched the demonstrations. After each presentation, the participants reported whether they felt they understood the demonstration and how engaged they were while watching it.
The Results
Sure enough, the researchers found two distinct differences in the brain activity between participants.
The first finding isn’t all that surprising, but it’s still interesting nonetheless. The team found that the students with greater expertise in math showed significant differences in brain activity compared to those with less math experience.
For instance, the students with less experience showed more complex activity in their prefrontal cortex, which is located behind the forehead and is responsible for a lotta things, including our executive functions, like thinking and problem-solving.
The researchers believe the less experienced students used their prefrontal cortex more because they worked harder to understand the steps of the complicated math demonstrations than those with more math experience.
It was the second discovery that “really” interested Poikonen, though. The brains of the students who engaged in mathematics regularly showed significant activity that seemed to link the parietal and frontal brain regions. She explains in Scientific American:
More specifically, these areas exhibited a pattern of activity that neuroscientists describe as delta waves. These are very slow waves of electrical activity that are typically associated with states such as deep sleep.
Intriguingly, aside from differences in expertise and brain activity, the students did not differ significantly in their IQ or self-reported math anxiety levels. This observation suggests that repetitive and deliberate or intentional study helped some participants become more efficient at quantitative thinking, which is a way of thinking that uses mathematical concepts to understand and solve real-world problems.
Poikonen acknowledges that her study involved university students and not world-renowned experts, but even so, she believes “the differences in brain activity that we observed are still a testament to the power of practice in expertise.”
What’s Happening
The researchers were especially interested in the delta waves observed in the more mathematically experienced students and suspected they play a central role when we’re immersed in complex problem-solving.
Of our five known brainwaves, delta waves are one of the least understood because they’re typically only observed during deep sleep, unlike gamma, alpha, beta, and theta brainwaves, which occur while we’re awake.
However, recent research supports Poikonen’s theory that the slower delta waves are crucial for cognitive processing, including “deep internal concentration and information transfer between distant brain regions” when we’re awake — particularly among experienced meditators when they enter meditative states. In her article, Poikonen points out one thing that sleep, meditation, and mathematical problem-solving have in common:
“[I]n each case, the brain needs to suppress irrelevant external information and unneeded thoughts to really focus and concentrate on the task at hand.”
Poikonen and her team believe delta waves may play an important role whenever we’re immersed in complex and contextual problem-solving. Especially considering that beyond those three categories, similar delta waves have been found in musicians' brains when they listen to music and dancers’ brains when they watch a dance.
As experts identify more instances that delta waves present when we’re awake and the activities in which they arise, these slow-moving delta waves are likely deeply engaged in concentration and gaining expertise.
The researchers also theorize that this delta state of deep concentration is “generalizable,” that developing this state in one domain, like learning guitar or Italian, could help us in others.
Perspective Shift
Technology is great, and I’m a big fan of it, as it definitely makes our lives easier and more efficient in many essential ways. But as with everything else, balance is crucial. Poikonen cautions us not to become too reliant on technology and remember that the seemingly “inefficient” effort we make to work through a problem is powerful too.
As Google’s, Apple’s, and other’s artificial intelligence models continue advancing and offering us tempting shortcuts for problem-solving, we should remember that every time we offload a cognitive hardship to a calculator or ask ChatGPT to summarize books or write essays, we’re missing out on the chance to improve ourselves through building our skills, our knowledge, and practicing deep concentration.
Consider the issues we already see, such as the students from fourth grade to university level who struggle with reading comprehension and writing. As Poikonen says in her article:
When I consider how frenetically we switch between tasks and how eagerly we externalize creativity and complex problem-solving to artificial intelligence in our high-speed society, I’m left with a question:
“What happens to our human ability to solve complex problems in the future if we teach ourselves not to use deep concentration?”
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Thought-provoking. Thanks