Importance of Fingers in Math

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Misunderstanding Mental Math

Math is recognized, even in schools, as a discipline with a lot of abstractions. But in reality, at the school level, math has always been presented, in schools, as a subject of numbers and symbols.

Since abstractions are done in the minds, there is a misunderstanding that "mental math" is to be done "only in the head". The truth is that "mental math" is supposed to be done "using the head" which means using the powers of the mind, including visualisation, number sense etc.

Prohibiting Use of Fingers

Accompanying this is a wrong impression that visual methods & use of fingers is only for the lower grades or for weaker students.

Many schools actively discourage use of fingers in the class.

Importance of Visual & Muscle Memories

Recent neuroscience research of the brain completely repudiates this idea. It reveals the potential of visual mathematics for transforming students’ mathematical experiences and developing important brain pathways.

Embodied cognition (mind & body working together) researchers point out that many of our mathematical concepts are held as visual and sensory motor memories. When students learn through visual approaches, mathematics changes for them, and they get access to deep and new understandings.

Even when people work on a number calculation, such as 12 x 25, our mathematical thinking is grounded in visual processing.

Importance of Fingers in Math

A specific region of our brain that is dedicated to the perception and representation of fingers, known as the somatosensory finger area of the brain. We “see” a representation of our fingers in our brains, even when we do not use fingers in a calculation.

When people receive training on ways to perceive and represent their own fingers, they develop better representations of their fingers, which leads to higher mathematics achievement. When 6-year old students improved the flexibility & quality of their finger representations, they improved in arithmetic knowledge, particularly subitizing, counting and number ordering.

Brian Butterworth, a leading brain researcher in this area, states that if students are not learning about numbers through thinking about their fingers, numbers “will never have a normal representation in the brain”.

Telling students not to use their fingers to count or represent quantities is akin to halting their mathematical development. It is important to remove the stigma from counting on fingers and to see this activity as inherently important and valuable.

Digital Economy is Visual

The current knowledge-digital economy is based largely on images, that are ‘rich in content and information. Today, scientists & mathematicians rarely if ever, solve a problem without visual representations. The core purpose of learning mathematics has changed from computations to representing abstract ideas.

Visual activities not only offer deep engagement and new understandings, but they show students that mathematics can be an open and beautiful subject, rather than a fixed, closed and impenetrable subject.

Effective Use of Fingers

Neuroscientists recommend that fingers be regarded as the link between numbers and their symbolic representation, and an external support for learning arithmetic problems.

They offer three recommendations for teaching and parenting.


 * 1) Encourage and celebrate students’ visual approaches and replace the idea that strong mathematics learners are those who memorize and calculate well. Recent PISA evidence, from millions of students, tells us that the students who approach mathematics with a memorization approach are the lowest achieving students in the world
 * 2) Discourage speed and encourage deep thinking
 * 3) Encourage use of fingers to help visualization. More the visualization, less the emphasis on memorization