[NickM]

I think you might be missing the point of the article: the study being cited isn't trying to establish the existence of a "language brain" or a "math brain", that's just the way the headline editorialized it to help people understand the conclusions.

The conclusion of the study was that linguistic aptitude seemed to be more correlated with programming aptitude than mathematical aptitude, which seems fairly interesting, and also fairly unconcerned with which specific physical regions in the brain might happen to be involved.

[godelski]

I understood it.

  > The conclusion of the study was that linguistic aptitude seemed to be more correlated with programming aptitude than mathematical aptitude

And this is what I'm pushing back against and where I think you've misinterpreted.

  > They found that how well students learned Python was mostly explained by general cognitive abilities (problem solving and working memory), while how quickly they learned was explained by both general cognitive skills and language aptitude.

I made the claim that these are in fact math skills, but most people confuse with arithmetic. Math is a language. It is a language we created to help with abstraction. Code is math. There's no question about this. Go look into lambda calculus and the Church-Turing Thesis. There is much more in this direction too. And of course, we should have a clear connection to connect it all if you're able to see some abstraction.

[seadan83]

> Math is a language.

Language is not math, therefore math is not language.

[prmph]

The point is that linguistic aptitude _is_ math aptitude, and vice versa.

From my experience, my ability to articulate myself well is bound up with my ability to abstract and detect patterns. It is the same thing I apply to crafting software, the same thing I apply to creating visual art.

I think high-cognitive-ability people segregating themselves into artsy vs mathy people has more to do with their experiences in their formative years.