PEOPLE with a gift for maths, such as Nobel Prize-winning John Nash, portrayed by Russell Crowe in the film A Beautiful Mind, really are better at using their heads, scientists have revealed.

Research shows they employ both the left and right sides of their brain when tackling a problem.

Most people tend to favour one side or the other.

Psychologists in America and Australia studied 18 mathematically-gifted children averaging 14 years of age.

Their performance in tests was compared with that of 18 children of average maths ability and 24 college students with an average age of 20.

The students were shown letter patterns flashed on the left or right hand sides of a computer screen.

Their ability to match patterns indicated how they used the left or right sides of their brains.

An image on the left side of the screen, for instance, would normally be processed in the right brain hemisphere, and vice versa.

Data on both sides would be picked up by both eyes and processed by both halves of the brain.

There were two types of tasks, "local" and "global". "Local" involved deciding whether small components of big letters matched each other, and "global" involved saying whether whole big letters matched.

Full Article