During a lab meeting, one of our PhD researchers recalls how her father would forbid her from using paper to help solve maths homework problems by writing them down. Another admits that she sometimes still uses her hands to make small calculations, although she does so while hiding them behind her back. When we realise that all of us use our fingers in order to answer demands for the'third, fifth, and seventh digits' of our secret online banking password, we laugh in relief. We are not so daft after all, or at least we are not alone. Consider a game of Scrabble, the researchers say.

A six month old child's spatial awareness can reveal how well it will do at maths later in life, researchers have found. The groundbreaking study is the earliest link between spatial awareness and maths, and could explain why some people embrace maths, while others feel they are bad at it and avoid it. It shows spatial reasoning measured in infancy predicts how children do at maths at four years of age. Psychologist Stella Lourenco, whose lab conducted the research, with one of the participants. The Emory study found spatial reasoning measured at six months infancy predicts how children do at maths at four years of age.