Ah, Numbers...

So...how many home runs have been hit in Major League Baseball as of about 10pm last night? Let's see, 120 odd years, 10 then 20 then 30 teams over that span, 150 or so games per year per team.

Did you guess 250,000? Nicely done. Yep, the cranky and determined Gary Sheffield hit numbers 249,999 and 250,000.

Now this:

If you think you're just "not a numbers person", you might be correct. It seems that some people are born with a naturally better sense of numbers than others - although that doesn't mean education can't improve your mathematical abilities.

Being good at maths is thought to depend on two factors: the inherent sense of numbers that children, and some animals, possess from a very young age, and the formal education they receive at school. How these factors relate to one another and how much this inherent "number sense" varies between individuals had not been investigated, until now.

Justin Halberda at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and his colleagues examined the performance of 64 14-year-olds on a test of approximate number system (ANS) – the ability to estimate numbers without counting them precisely. The children had also received standard maths tests every year between the ages of 5 and 11 years.

Teenagers with the highest ANS scores also tended to have the best scores in maths tests all the way back to the age of 5, even after measurements of IQ and visual-spatial reasoning skills were taken into account. "There are vast individual differences in the acuity of this number sense in 14-year-olds," says Halberda.

While it seems likely that ANS can be shaped by education to some degree, previous studies have shown that ANS scores in an Amazonian tribe that receives no maths education are similar to those in an educated French population, suggesting that the effects of education are likely to be subtle. All of the children in the current study received the same maths education.

Halberda cautions against thinking success or failure in school mathematics is entirely genetic and therefore immutable. "ANS is powerful, but it certainly isn't predicting 100% of the variance [in mathematical ability]," he says.

Halberda is currently testing whether ANS can be strengthened by specific training.

Here's the link