As someone with a graduate degree in mathematics, I not only find the result with blind people unsurprising but also doubt the veracity of the results with sigh

As someone with a graduate degree in mathematics, I not only find the result with blind people unsurprising but also doubt the veracity of the results with sighted people. Let me elaborate. Pure mathematics, at a high level, seeks for formalize some sort of observable, intuitive behavior in an experientially accessible system and then generalize it to an abstract degree that is no longer anything to do with experience. For example, counting pebbles directly leads to the positive integers, but you can construct the real numbers, almost all of which are uncomputable and/or transcendental, starting entirely from the integers. When doing high school algebra, we are reasoning about quantities and moving them around, so it makes sense that an otherwise underutilized visual cortex would be used for this purpose in a blind person, especially considering that he would need to construct a more elaborate mental model as a consequence of being unable to look at scratch paper. I would not expect a random sample of sighted people to show activation of visual or spatial reasoning areas just because math education is so poor and so many people get through it by memorization rather than employing abstract reasoning skills based on spatial reasoning - in fact, I would expect increased activation of areas related to language. I would expect fMRI imaging of mathematicians, in contrast, to show high activations of areas to do with spatial reasoning, and perhaps even visual processing. See, for example, [1], which provides evidence for this hypothesis. Drawing on personal experience, I learned the basic concepts of linear algebra by direct analogy to three-dimensional visualization, which is of course experientially already present. However, as I progressed and studied n-dimensional vector spaces, I no longer had an experiential analog - and yet I still use some of the same spatial reasoning abstractions (in a different, extended and/or generalized way) when reasoning in the N-dimensional case. My opinion is that this study should have included an experimental group of trained mathematicians (or at least advanced mathematics students with demonstrated mathematical reasoning skills), and I again point to [1] for some degree of justification for this stance. [1] http://m.pnas.org/content/113/18/4909.abstract?sid=fae659df-d2cf-4d4f-bf92-7ed163684721 http://m.pnas.org/content/113/18/4909.abstract?sid=fae659df-...