Latest / Math Therapy / What neuroscience actually says about gender & math w/ Sarah McKay

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What neuroscience actually says about gender & math w/ Sarah McKay · Math Therapy

0:03
Sarah McKay: Parents are much more likely to Google"is my son a genius" than"is my daughter a genius".
0:08
Sarah McKay: Instead, they are Googling like,"is my daughter beautiful?" So people are defaulting to, I've got this little boy who's smart, well, he must be a genius.
0:17
Sarah McKay: They're not Googling is my daughter a genius.
0:20
Sarah McKay: stop talking about maths being a boy thing that girls can also do.
0:24
Sarah McKay: "Girls can do maths too", is not the message that we want to give.
0:28
Sarah McKay: We need to not even be using language like that whatsoever.
0:31
Sarah McKay: Everyone has equal potential to learn to do maths.
0:37
Vanessa Vakharia: Okay, welcome to another episode of Math Therapy.
0:40
Vanessa Vakharia: So guys, I heard today's guest on the Mel Robbins podcast.
0:43
Vanessa Vakharia: That's right.
0:44
Vanessa Vakharia: The Mel Robbins podcast, and I was like, oh my God, I need this woman on the pod.
0:49
Vanessa Vakharia: So I actually asked her and she actually said, yes.
0:53
Vanessa Vakharia: Today's guest is Dr.
0:54
Vanessa Vakharia: Sarah McKay, and she is a neuroscientist who actually explains the brain in a way that will make you feel like, smarter, calmer, and slightly annoyed you weren't taught all this stuff sooner.
1:04
Vanessa Vakharia: For years, I've had so many questions about our brains, and I was so excited to have an expert on the brain to feel them all.
1:10
Vanessa Vakharia: Are boys really smarter at math than girls?
1:13
Vanessa Vakharia: Is anyone actually born with a math brain?
1:15
Vanessa Vakharia: Does puberty actually have an impact on math ability?
1:18
Vanessa Vakharia: Who knows?
1:19
Vanessa Vakharia: Well, actually, she knows.
1:20
Vanessa Vakharia: And she's gonna tell you.
1:22
Vanessa Vakharia: She also drops a very hot take about one thing we all need to stop saying right this second to help dismantle the myth that there are any biological differences between genders in math.
1:33
Vanessa Vakharia: And guess what guys?
1:34
Vanessa Vakharia: This thing I've been saying, and it was so helpful for me to hear that what I was saying was actually not helpful.
1:40
Vanessa Vakharia: If you've ever thought maybe my brain is just not wired for math, this episode is for you.
1:45
Vanessa Vakharia: And I just know you have other people in your life that have felt the same.
1:50
Vanessa Vakharia: So text them, your students, your teacher friends, your group chat, your kids, everyone do it.
1:56
Vanessa Vakharia: Now get ready to have your mind blown.
1:59
Vanessa Vakharia: Yes, that was a brain joke.
2:00
Vanessa Vakharia: Sort of, kind of.
2:02
Vanessa Vakharia: I cannot wait to hear what neuroscience facts shocks you most.
2:05
Vanessa Vakharia: So please let me know by texting the podcast or DMing me on Instagram at The Math Guru.
2:12
Vanessa Vakharia: First of all welcome to the podcast.
2:15
Sarah McKay: Thank you.
2:16
Vanessa Vakharia: I'm so excited to have you on today, all the way from Australia.
2:20
Vanessa Vakharia: The reason you're on here is because I initially heard you on the Mel Robbins podcast.
2:24
Vanessa Vakharia: One of the key things that stood out to me is you said that there was no such thing as a male brain or a female brain specifically.
2:32
Vanessa Vakharia: And I, I know I, I'm already like, I'm paraphrasing just to be click baity here, because I then started thinking to myself, is there such a thing as a math brain and is it wired differently for boys?
2:44
Vanessa Vakharia: And all of those questions percolated in my mind.
2:46
Vanessa Vakharia: So I guess the first question I'm just gonna start with is, I'm just gonna copy Male Robbins because obviously she knows what's up, and I'm gonna ask you, is there such a thing as a male brain or a female brain?
2:56
Sarah McKay: There are biological and social differences in the brains of males and females.
3:04
Sarah McKay: So we could say there are sex differences across populations.
3:08
Sarah McKay: And so you're into math.
3:10
Sarah McKay: So, you know, if we had a thousand men and a thousand women who age in their sort of thirties or forties, if we were to explore and examine and measure every metric we could of their brains, we would see subtle differences between that group of thousand men and that group of thousand women.
3:27
Sarah McKay: If we were to pluck any male or any female from that group and open up their skull and look inside their brain, we were not gonna see a pink brain, we're not gonna see a blue brain.
3:36
Sarah McKay: The differences are much more subtle and so the thing is, if we've got a brain, there's a hundred different metrics that we could use to measure that brain, to quantify that brain.
3:45
Sarah McKay: So we could look at size or shape or different kind of components, parts of cortex, different sub nuclei, the size or the shape.
3:52
Sarah McKay: We could look at cognitive testing.
3:54
Sarah McKay: We could look at risk factors for disease.
3:57
Sarah McKay: We could look at perception, we could look at brain processing.
4:00
Sarah McKay: Say we had a hundred measures and we've got a thousand males and a thousand females.
4:04
Sarah McKay: There will be in some of those measures, but not all, some differences in those two populations.
4:10
Sarah McKay: Right.
4:11
Sarah McKay: And other times there'll be absolutely no differences whatsoever.
4:14
Sarah McKay: The question then is if we see a subtle difference, is that due to biological sex only?
4:23
Sarah McKay: Is it due to your genes?
4:25
Sarah McKay: Is it due to your hormones?
4:26
Sarah McKay: Is it due to kind of in utero and early postnatal development, or does it come about by the experiences that we have?
4:35
Sarah McKay: So there are some subtle sex differences.
4:39
Sarah McKay: But we don't always know exactly where those differences have arisen from.
4:44
Vanessa Vakharia: Oh my God.
4:45
Vanessa Vakharia: Okay.
4:45
Vanessa Vakharia: First of all, that makes so much sense.
4:47
Vanessa Vakharia: When it comes to math, is there a difference between the male brain and the female brain when it comes to math?
4:52
Sarah McKay: So there's lots of ways we can look at kind of potential or ability or we can just do standardized testing across populations at different ages.
5:01
Sarah McKay: And what we tend to see, and this is say me speaking from the data that I would be familiar with here in Australia, um, we do standardized testing of kids in primary schools up and through high school every couple of years.
5:16
Sarah McKay: And if we were to look at, say, grade, five, so kids are, well, eight, are they kind of 10, 11 ish there, and we looked at our distribution curves of math, of math scores across populations, we would see there would be this subtle, subtle difference in math scores between 10-year-old girls and 10-year-old boys.
5:36
Sarah McKay: Now the, the actual difference between the peak of those distributions is, is very, very subtly different.
5:42
Sarah McKay: Barely, barely different at all.
5:44
Sarah McKay: But there is a subtle difference.
5:45
Sarah McKay: And then we would tend to see the distribution curve of the males being slightly wider.
5:50
Sarah McKay: So we'd have, some boys will be getting lower than average scores and some boys will be getting higher than average and the girls distribution curve will be slightly narrower.
5:59
Sarah McKay: So that is a very, very subtle difference.
6:01
Sarah McKay: But there's tons of overlap.
6:02
Sarah McKay: There'll be heaps of girls that'll be better at the maths and the average boy and lots of boys not great at maths compared to the average girl, right?
6:08
Sarah McKay: So we do tend to see subtle differences there.
6:13
Sarah McKay: So one of those, which is kind of related to maths, and lots of people have heard about this, so where the trope women can't read maps has come from is this idea that males on average across the, you know, across the population, are better at rotating a 3D object in their mind's eye.
6:29
Sarah McKay: So looking at a map and then kind of imagining the way they would walk through a route or looking at, you know, kinds of pieces of Lego and be able to say, what would that look like from the other side?
6:38
Sarah McKay: But then if we looked across populations, we would see girls and women scoring slightly better on average in things like verbal reasoning or verbal memory, or perhaps even that might translate to kind of reading and writing in schools.
6:55
Sarah McKay: All of this said there are some very subtle differences if they are there, where are they coming from?
7:03
Sarah McKay: Is it due to biology or is it due to something else?
7:07
Sarah McKay: And this is where I think brains are cool and interesting because, there's some studies that have kind of starting to come out that are looking at what, what are the origins of these differences?
7:17
Sarah McKay: Do they matter?
7:18
Sarah McKay: What can we do about them?
7:20
Sarah McKay: How do we talk about them?
7:21
Sarah McKay: How do we explain them?
7:22
Sarah McKay: And I think that's where things sort of start to get interesting.
7:25
Vanessa Vakharia: Well, because this is making me think why?
7:28
Vanessa Vakharia: Like, can they do they were born with a greater ability or because somewhere along the way, like a lot of people will say, like for example, reason let's say boys may have better spatial awareness in some cases is because they play more video games, for example, right?
7:42
Vanessa Vakharia: Or they play with more Lego, let's just use that as an example, which is a nurture, that's not nature.
7:46
Vanessa Vakharia: What I'll hear is this argument so often from parents and there's just this deep rooted belief that, and I think this is my question, are, are boys born with brains that have more capacity for math ability than girls?
8:01
Vanessa Vakharia: I think that's the real question we're looking at here.
8:04
Sarah McKay: No.
8:05
Sarah McKay: Yeah, the answer is no.
8:07
Sarah McKay: So if we start looking at, and this is what we have to be, there is no, no, we ha and we have to be so careful with how we are talking about these ideas, and when we are talking about sex differences and when we're talking about stereotypes and being very clear and careful when we are talking about biological sex versus gender, we could say the word gender here to mean the experiences we have, not necessarily You know, your own gender identity.
8:34
Sarah McKay: I use gender to mean sort of gendered experiences.
8:37
Sarah McKay: And studies that have been done of like little babies and preschoolers before you kind of informal education or at school.
8:44
Sarah McKay: We don't really see any sex differences in terms of we are not doing maths tests on like two year olds, but the ability to kind of sense and understand numbers and spatial awareness that, that type of thing.
8:57
Sarah McKay: But there's this fascinating study that was published.
9:00
Sarah McKay: It came out of France, June, 2025.
9:02
Sarah McKay: It, study is fascinating because this stereotype that boys are better than maths, um, is very pervasive amongst kids, amongst teachers, amongst parents.
9:12
Sarah McKay: Not, not, not you and not me, because we know our stuff, right?
9:16
Sarah McKay: We know our shit.
9:17
Sarah McKay: This study in France has done on millions of school kids across the country looking at all different socioeconomic kind of groups, looking at different types of schools.
9:26
Sarah McKay: And what they did was they were looking to see if we start to see this slight trend whereby boys start getting a little bit better at maths as a group than girls, when does that emerge?
9:40
Sarah McKay: And it was fascinating.
9:41
Sarah McKay: So they were, they started looking at math schools, and this is an oversimplification of the study, but it helps us understand it.
9:46
Sarah McKay: So essentially they started testing the kids at maths as the day they started arriving at school, and were testing them kind of over that first year.
9:53
Sarah McKay: And what they started to see was when they, at, they first started in school, they were completely level pegging and within about four or five,
10:02
Vanessa Vakharia: Like how old were they when they
10:03
Sarah McKay: Five.
10:04
Sarah McKay: Starting school at five.
10:06
Sarah McKay: You turn five, you go to school.
10:08
Sarah McKay: Um, we start at the beginning of the, the, the school year and they saw within the first kind of four or five months, they started to see that slight divergence emerging within about five, five months, half a year or so at school.
10:19
Sarah McKay: And I was like, well, is this something to do with the kids getting older?
10:23
Sarah McKay: Is this to do with their brains just developing and diverging at this age?
10:27
Sarah McKay: And what is fascinating was they could look at kids who were just a couple of days apart in age, but in completely different school years.
10:34
Sarah McKay: 'cause they've got a very sort of strict cutoff.
10:36
Sarah McKay: So you could have a kid who was born on, August the first, um, and then a kid who was born on August the 15th.
10:43
Sarah McKay: And so they might be in completely different academic years, but they're only about two weeks apart in age and they still saw the patterns.
10:49
Sarah McKay: So the slight divergence in math scores between all girls and all boys started to emerge once they went to school and started being taught maths.
11:00
Vanessa Vakharia: What does that mean?
11:02
Sarah McKay: It is not some biological brain development thing.
11:06
Sarah McKay: It is to do with this sort of water that they are swimming in.
11:10
Sarah McKay: There's no lack of achievement on day one, but it emerges within that kind of first half year of school.
11:16
Sarah McKay: So there is something going on when kids start learning maths.
11:21
Sarah McKay: That boys start to kind of peel off sort of slightly.
11:25
Sarah McKay: Now we might see the exact opposite.
11:27
Sarah McKay: I'm not, I haven't seen the, the studies that have been done on what do we see in terms of reading ability and verbal ability.
11:33
Sarah McKay: And we kind of might tend to see girls peeling away slightly there.
11:38
Sarah McKay: I'm not sure whether they've done that, that same study.
11:41
Sarah McKay: So we definitely see this slight sex, biological sex, we could call it gender gap emerging.
11:48
Sarah McKay: But it appears that it is around how kids are learning in the classroom.
11:54
Sarah McKay: Now, is that, is that the five year olds themselves going, well, I can't do maths.
11:59
Sarah McKay: The boys do maths.
12:00
Sarah McKay: The girls don't.
12:02
Sarah McKay: I mean, we can't blame the five year olds, right?
12:05
Sarah McKay: It must be something to do with how they are learning and absorbing what perhaps it means to be a maths learner.
12:14
Vanessa Vakharia: But what, hold on.
12:16
Vanessa Vakharia: This is really hot tea because The study is basically saying, sex differences emerge as soon as kids enter school.
12:25
Vanessa Vakharia: There's something about what's happening in school that is causing boys to quote unquote do a tiny bit better than the girls.
12:33
Vanessa Vakharia: Am I right?
12:34
Sarah McKay: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
12:35
Vanessa Vakharia: So what are the theories, what could be happening?
12:37
Sarah McKay: Well, so the, one idea is that girls might tend to have more anxiety about learning something like maths than boys do, which could perhaps diminish their performance.
12:46
Sarah McKay: So they may be completely able to.
12:49
Sarah McKay: They've got the ability to do this, they've got the potential, but perhaps for some reason they've absorbed a stereotype that little girls aren't as good at maths as boys.
12:58
Sarah McKay: And we would call this stereotype threat.
13:00
Sarah McKay: And you may be familiar with this.
13:02
Sarah McKay: We see this across ages.
13:04
Sarah McKay: If we get kids to like, you're all 15, here's a classroom of kids, half boys, half girls.
13:10
Sarah McKay: We go in and we say, girls, we want you to do really well in this because you know that there is this idea out there that girls don't do as well in maths as boys.
13:17
Sarah McKay: And so then the girls start going, oh God, I better not prove that stereotype wrong.
13:21
Sarah McKay: And the girls will actually perform worse if they have been primed to think this before they go and do the test.
13:28
Sarah McKay: And we see this with other kinds of, um, you know, we could do this with racial minorities.
13:33
Sarah McKay: We could go, Hey, you know, Asian kids are always gonna be better at maths, so everyone else, you better try hard to prove that the Asian kids aren't gonna be as good at maths as you, you are gonna be as good at maths as them.
13:43
Sarah McKay: And, when you prime people with stereotypes, we call a stereotype threat, that somehow creates a little bit of anxiety, which means you don't perform as well.
13:52
Sarah McKay: Okay.
13:52
Sarah McKay: Maybe because you're so busy thinking about can I do this well, that you don't do well.
13:57
Sarah McKay: 'Cause your attention is occupied with other matters.
14:00
Sarah McKay: So that was one idea.
14:02
Vanessa Vakharia: I wanna throw in there too, for those listening,'cause I, I am obsessed with stereotype threat.
14:06
Vanessa Vakharia: Sarah's talking about priming people, but priming doesn't mean, it doesn't even necessarily mean you have to explicitly say it because those stereotypes live in, what did you call it?
14:15
Vanessa Vakharia: The water we swim in.
14:16
Sarah McKay: The water we swim in.
14:18
Sarah McKay: Yeah.
14:18
Sarah McKay: Yeah.
14:19
Vanessa Vakharia: If that's just a part of the culture that girls know that people believe that they're gonna be worse at mass, that is priming enough to create that math anxiety.
14:28
Sarah McKay: Yeah.
14:28
Sarah McKay: And there is language that we can use where we inadvertently say instead of like, girls are good at maths too, or girls can also do maths.
14:38
Sarah McKay: The, the implicit message there is that maths is a boy thing and girls, if we, you know, you can also do this boy thing.
14:45
Sarah McKay: So there is a lot of implicit, perhaps well-intentioned messaging coming from Girls can do anything.
14:51
Sarah McKay: Girls can also do maths.
14:53
Sarah McKay: Maths is not just a boy thing.
14:54
Sarah McKay: Girl maths, you know, Taylor Swift loves maths.
14:58
Sarah McKay: Girls can now love maths too.
14:59
Sarah McKay: The implicit messaging there is that it is innately a boy thing and girls are opting into something that's a boy thing.
15:05
Sarah McKay: So we might be unwittingly and inadvertently creating stereotype threat, by trying to big the girls up.
15:14
Sarah McKay: So we need to kind of not, we need to not even let this be a thing.
15:18
Sarah McKay: There are a couple of other theories the researchers have got.
15:20
Sarah McKay: Part of this is, is sort of semi-related, the idea that math's ability is this, and this is kind of a global sort of perception, that if boys are good at maths it is because they innately are good at maths.
15:32
Sarah McKay: It is like this biological predisposition to have to be good at maths.
15:36
Sarah McKay: It's just intrinsic to them.
15:38
Sarah McKay: It is in their nature.
15:39
Sarah McKay: And when girls are good at maths, it's because they work really, really hard and they're very diligent, hard workers.
15:45
Sarah McKay: And so boys tend to get praised as being, you're a maths genius.
15:49
Sarah McKay: Girls are like, well, didn't you work hard to learn the maths?
15:52
Sarah McKay: So perhaps we are transmitting these stereotypes, attributing maths genius to boys and maths.
15:59
Sarah McKay: Hardworking in diligence to, to girls.
16:01
Sarah McKay: And little girls are very good and well behaved and look at how hard she's tried.
16:05
Sarah McKay: That's how come she got the good score.
16:06
Sarah McKay: So there's a bit of subtle messaging there as well, which the girls may be sort of starting to absorb.
16:12
Sarah McKay: And whether that's coming from the teachers themselves, perhaps even unwittingly, whether that's coming, the parents, because of course kids are going to school and then maths is gonna be taught as a subject for the first time so parents may pay more attention to their children's education at that point.
16:30
Sarah McKay: And so this will be the opportunity for them to start transmitting these stereotypes about boys being good at these things and girls having to work very hard to be just as good at these things.
16:41
Vanessa Vakharia: Is there anything in there about like the way math is taught or like, are all the theories about like basically the messages that girls are and boys are getting differently?
16:49
Vanessa Vakharia: I'm actually so curious.
16:51
Sarah McKay: I mean, we see this, whether it be adults or whether we see this with kids.
16:55
Sarah McKay: People are far more likely to assign genius and innate brilliance to males than to females.
17:01
Sarah McKay: Girls work hard to get there, boys are just innately good at this.
17:04
Sarah McKay: There's this Google search analysis, and I can't quite think of the exact data or the numbers backing it up, but it was parents are much more likely to Google"is my son a genius" than"is my daughter a genius".
17:17
Sarah McKay: Instead, they are Googling like,"is my daughter beautiful?" Which is just like, so incredible.
17:22
Sarah McKay: Or"is my daughter fat" I think was another, was another one, which is kind of wild.
17:26
Sarah McKay: So people are defaulting to, I've got this little boy who's smart, well, he must be a genius.
17:33
Sarah McKay: They're not typically Googling is my daughter, a genius.
17:35
Sarah McKay: And we see this across kind of cultures and we see this emerging all the way through and through adolescents up.
17:43
Sarah McKay: There's this other study as well, which is kind of, which is a little bit older than the French study, but there's this amazing research group in New York that has been looking at these attitudes to gender stereotypes The Cimpian lab, Andre Cimpian, C-I-M-P-I-A-N.
17:57
Sarah McKay: You may be familiar with their work.
18:00
Sarah McKay: And they're really interested in this idea about how children acquire these gender stereotypes that, you know, who has to work hard at maths?
18:06
Sarah McKay: Boys or girls?
18:07
Sarah McKay: Well girls.
18:08
Sarah McKay: 'Cause boys are brilliant.
18:09
Sarah McKay: Where do they, how do they start absorbing this?
18:12
Sarah McKay: And it definitely is within the coup, first couple of years of school.
18:15
Sarah McKay: So kids' brains are like kind of growing and changing all the way through school.
18:20
Sarah McKay: It's not like they get to age five and suddenly something happens in their brain development that the boys take off in maths and the girls take off in reading.
18:30
Sarah McKay: Um, so they, they went and had a look at this idea of, first couple of days of school, go, who's gonna play the, the maths game?
18:39
Sarah McKay: This is the one for clever kids.
18:40
Sarah McKay: And they've kind of made words up like zwacky or quirky or whatever.
18:44
Sarah McKay: Who wants to play zwacky?
18:45
Sarah McKay: It's the, the smart kids game.
18:47
Sarah McKay: And all the little girls go, me and all the little boys go me and they all play the game.
18:51
Sarah McKay: You go and do that at age seven.
18:53
Sarah McKay: Who wants to play?
18:54
Sarah McKay: Zwacky, the game for smart children and all the boys go me and there will be some of the girls that will stop, that will start pulling back and going, oh, well the boys will be playing that game,'Cause that's the smart kids game.
19:07
Sarah McKay: So that's really interesting.
19:08
Sarah McKay: Now, not all girls and, and not all boys, but there will be a proportion of girls, the boys just keep up that sort of self-confidence and belief in themselves.
19:17
Sarah McKay: And we see this all the way through.
19:18
Sarah McKay: I mean, even sort of Cheryl Sandberg was talking about this 10 years ago with Lean In, right?
19:23
Sarah McKay: The men will be asking for the, you know, the, the promotions at work and, and the girls, so it starts within the first year or so of primary education.
19:34
Sarah McKay: Boys develop confidence and belief in themselves and the girls sort of start to to waver.
19:38
Sarah McKay: And I've got sons, teenage sons now, and it has been fascinating knowing some of these ideas in the back of my head to watch them kind of traverse their education.
19:48
Sarah McKay: When they got to high school, and I would go to the prize giving every year and I love going to prize givings'cause you just see so much.
19:54
Sarah McKay: I remember primary school prize giving, they were giving out stem prizes, and I kid you not, I sat there and did a tally and this is primary school stem across every year.
20:04
Sarah McKay: I think there was something like 20 prizes and about four went to girls.
20:09
Sarah McKay: And I remember at the prize giving all these other moms and dads kept turning around and looking at me and I'm going, what, you all know what I think?
20:18
Sarah McKay: And I swear there were more kids called Josh that got prizes for STEM than girls.
20:23
Sarah McKay: It was crazy.
20:24
Vanessa Vakharia: Oh my God.
20:26
Sarah McKay: Go to high school, right, and you go to the school prize givings, and this is my anecdotal observation.
20:32
Sarah McKay: First sort of in, in Australia, you go from years seven to 12, so you've got six years of high school, right?
20:37
Sarah McKay: We don't have a middle school.
20:38
Sarah McKay: You've got six years.
20:40
Sarah McKay: So the kids are sort of 12, 13 when they start and sort of 17, 18, when they finish.
20:45
Sarah McKay: First, few, 70, 80% even, maybe even more first in class.
20:49
Sarah McKay: Who gets first in class for those first three or four years across every subject.
20:54
Sarah McKay: Who do you think.
20:55
Sarah McKay: The girls.
20:56
Sarah McKay: History, geography, maths, science, music, every now and then there'll be a boy come up on stage.
21:02
Sarah McKay: By the time you get to the final year of high school.
21:05
Sarah McKay: It is so interesting'cause then you sort of start to see boy, boy, boy, boy, boy, boy who gets the top, who gets ducks or valedictorian, I think you might call it in the US It's definitely the boys kind of come into play here.
21:18
Sarah McKay: Now what is going on there is super interesting, is that girls have been socialized to work hard and be diligent and to study and to focus and to put their hands up and to try really, really hard.
21:32
Sarah McKay: And they do that for those first few years.
21:34
Sarah McKay: And the boys just piss, piss about, and this is what the boys say to me, what, why, what's the point in bother?
21:40
Sarah McKay: It's no need to try until their final year.
21:42
Sarah McKay: 'cause it doesn't matter until then.
21:43
Sarah McKay: So they're just doing their thing.
21:46
Sarah McKay: You know, fulfilling gender stereotypes.
21:48
Sarah McKay: And then the boys suddenly decide last year or two of school that I should have better start trying now.
21:53
Sarah McKay: And then they start trying harder and then the boys sort of start stepping up.
21:58
Sarah McKay: And I said to my oldest son, I said, well, where are the, where are the girls who always getting first in class?
22:03
Sarah McKay: He says, oh, they're too busy fighting with each other and arguing with each other.
22:08
Sarah McKay: Um,'cause you know, socially things start to change once you go through puberty as well.
22:13
Sarah McKay: And he said, oh, well, all the boys are competing with each other.
22:16
Sarah McKay: And the, and they're sort of teaming up and working together, but also they are quite happy to compete and you know, who gets first, who gets second, who gets third.
22:27
Sarah McKay: There seems to be this kind of understanding amongst teenage boys that we can have hierarchy and we can have competition, and it's not social suicide or it's not gonna harm you socially in any way.
22:38
Sarah McKay: Whereas the girls, perhaps at this point in time, aren't wanting to kind of outcompete each other.
22:43
Sarah McKay: There will be be some that do, but, but this sort of the, the social life of teenagers starts to impact and integrate.
22:50
Sarah McKay: And I've seen this pattern like play out year after year after year at the, the prize giving.
22:54
Sarah McKay: So I'm looking forward to going to my son's high school prize giving this year to sort of see, see the pattern.
23:00
Sarah McKay: It's, it's wild, right?
23:01
Vanessa Vakharia: Does the prize giving differ by subject?
23:04
Vanessa Vakharia: Like, let's say like in English?
23:06
Vanessa Vakharia: So much of the research shows, especially my research and what I see with my students, that social suicide not only to like that competition sphere, but to the fact that math isn't seen as the thing they want to be good at or should be good at anymore.
23:20
Sarah McKay: And I have actually looked to see when, because they always publish the grades, you know, who, who were the top 20 kids in every subject.
23:28
Sarah McKay: And the bulk of the prizes for those subjects go to the boys.
23:34
Sarah McKay: Now is that because they are better at maths or has that emerged from the age five?
23:39
Sarah McKay: There was that little kind of difference there and then that differences been exacerbated.
23:44
Sarah McKay: Now, is that because the boys innately are better at maths?
23:47
Sarah McKay: Is there something that happens, and interestingly, I think we've got puberty in the mix as well.
23:53
Sarah McKay: So this is where we do start to see some sex differences emerge around puberty.
23:57
Sarah McKay: And it is hard again, because we are humans to tease out is it all to do with testosterone or is it to do with how we socialize?
24:05
Sarah McKay: And it's always, it's gonna be a mix.
24:08
Vanessa Vakharia: It's gonna be a mix.
24:08
Vanessa Vakharia: I have to tell, ask about this, to tell you this story, where I was on this radio interview and this interview, the guy literally said, the host said he had me on, because a study had come out, this was probably three years ago.
24:21
Vanessa Vakharia: And the study had come out to be like, oh my God.
24:23
Vanessa Vakharia: We looked at brain scans of like, know, boys and girls, like children age six, and there are no gender differences in math.
24:31
Vanessa Vakharia: So we're having this nice conversation And then he goes, this is how he ends the in interview, he goes, yeah, but I do wonder what happens after puberty.
24:41
Vanessa Vakharia: Then that was the end of it and I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
24:44
Vanessa Vakharia: 'cause he's implying that their brain scans will literally change where, when it comes to math ability.
24:49
Vanessa Vakharia: So I have to ask, is that a thing?
24:52
Vanessa Vakharia: No, right?
24:53
Sarah McKay: I, I don't, no, it's not like suddenly boys go through puberty and testosterone creates a maths center in their brain and we're,'cause we've just established that, we're starting to see that slight difference emerge in the first few years of primary school.
25:06
Sarah McKay: And it's not about biological change, it's about how they're learning maths.
25:11
Sarah McKay: But during puberty, we do start to see sex differences emerge because then we start to be exposed to sex hormones.
25:18
Sarah McKay: So in utero, baby boys are exposed to testosterone from their own testes and that kind of, sort of patterns up and gets their brain ready to be activated by testosterone again at puberty.
25:32
Sarah McKay: Girls aren't exposed to estrogen either from their own ovaries or from their mother.
25:36
Sarah McKay: and they kind of develop and pattern we use this word by default, to be then their brain's ready to be activated by sex hormones at puberty, primarily by estrogen.
25:48
Sarah McKay: Now that doesn't mean that the brains are completely different, rather, and when we say, you know, sort of patterned up and then activated, it's primarily around reproductive function.
25:57
Sarah McKay: So of course, girls are gonna need a center in their brain that regulates the menstrual cycle and ovulation.
26:03
Sarah McKay: Boys aren't gonna be doing that, right?
26:05
Sarah McKay: So we are gonna see primarily parts of the brain that are involved with sex and reproduction, starting to diverge a puberty,'cause that's what we, you know, it's important.
26:14
Sarah McKay: We need that.
26:15
Sarah McKay: And we see a lot of behaviors play out that way.
26:17
Sarah McKay: I mean, that's a very heterosexual way to talk about it, but typically this is what we see, you know, happening at puberty.
26:23
Sarah McKay: And what we see is when the sex, you know, your ovaries or your testes turn on, it kind of catapults the brain off through this sort of phase of pubertal brain development.
26:32
Sarah McKay: So bodies go through puberty and so too do brains because brains have got receptors for sex hormones.
26:37
Sarah McKay: And the trajectory of development is very, very similar in males and females.
26:42
Sarah McKay: And we often, you might often hear, oh, well boys' brains are not as mature as girls' brains like girls are a few years ahead, that boys.
26:50
Sarah McKay: And that's because what we see is that the brains going through puberty track more closely to pubertal stage than chronological age.
26:59
Sarah McKay: And again, if we look at a thousand kids, half males, half females, on average girls start going through puberty slightly earlier than boys.
27:08
Sarah McKay: But some boys go through puberty quite early, and some girls go through late.
27:12
Sarah McKay: So you could have a boy, he's gone through puberty early, he's six foot tall by the time he's 12, and his brain is gonna be further along development than a girl who perhaps doesn't hit puberty until she's 15.
27:24
Sarah McKay: So yeah, it's pubertal stage.
27:26
Sarah McKay: But the trajectory that they're going to follow and, and a lot of the trajectory is around kind of the refinement and the streamlining and the kind of the pruning and tuning of, parts of the brain involved with what we might call like our, our very human higher order executive functions.
27:42
Sarah McKay: So these are things that are gonna help us get, you know, focus at school, judgment, planning strategy, attention learning, lots of social interactions and emotional regulations.
27:54
Sarah McKay: So we see the cortex of the brain going through puberty actually getting slightly thinner.
27:59
Sarah McKay: And this doesn't mean it's degenerating, it doesn't mean it's undergoing renovation.
28:02
Sarah McKay: It simply means that it's gone into the state of kind of plasticity.
28:06
Sarah McKay: The window's been opened by sex hormones for then the experiences that we have all the way through puberty and adolescence, typically high school, to then guide the kind of patterning and wiring of those connections.
28:19
Sarah McKay: And so everything that happens to us during high school is being absorbed and is kind of sculpting the brain.
28:25
Sarah McKay: 'Cause the brain is very, very malleable going through puberty.
28:27
Sarah McKay: And that's been kicked off by those pubertal hormones.
28:30
Sarah McKay: So how much of that collision of the social world with these pubal brains is then creating that divergence even more perhaps in terms of math scores.
28:43
Sarah McKay: But we're also seeing girls on average, perhaps tending more towards being better at the, the verbal, you know, kind of words versus numbers.
28:53
Sarah McKay: That's a massive overgeneralization, and there are overlaps, but we do tend to see that persist, particularly the verbal ability in females being slightly more persist all the way through the lifespan.
29:07
Vanessa Vakharia: So gender aside, sex aside, is being a math person, a neurological type or is that, you know how people are like, oh, she has like, this person has a math brain, I've got a brain for math, I've got a brain for numbers.
29:19
Vanessa Vakharia: Is that a thing or is that And by, okay, let me, now you've taught me to reframe my question.
29:25
Vanessa Vakharia: Is that a thing we're born with?
29:27
Vanessa Vakharia: That's my actual question because I can understand how our brains can get shaped that way by environment.
29:33
Vanessa Vakharia: Are certain people born with a math brain?
29:36
Sarah McKay: I'm not necessarily sure whether it's a maths brain, but certainly some people are born with the cognitive capacity, the neurological ability to find learning easier and to find.
29:50
Vanessa Vakharia: Learning everything?
29:52
Sarah McKay: Learning everything.
29:53
Sarah McKay: Yeah.
29:53
Sarah McKay: And some people will perhaps tend towards, and my example is always, I don't wanna come back to my kids, but I've got one son who has said he loves a learning, he just loves learning something new.
30:05
Sarah McKay: And he is very quickly able to master something new.
30:09
Sarah McKay: And he actually loves maths, will probably study maths at university.
30:12
Sarah McKay: And it's not'cause he's a boy, he's, it's just the kind of the kid he is.
30:15
Sarah McKay: 'Cause then I have a second son who just, he hates a learning curve.
30:18
Sarah McKay: He just doesn't enjoy it.
30:20
Sarah McKay: He finds it more difficult.
30:21
Sarah McKay: Now is there something neurologically different in their brains?
30:24
Sarah McKay: I don't know whether we know the answer to that.
30:26
Sarah McKay: I do think that there are kids who innately find learning easier, it is like kind of part of their neurological wiring, because we know that there are also kids who really, really, really struggle with learning.
30:38
Sarah McKay: And I don't like to use the words IQ or intelligence, but they find learning harder and they're slower and they don't pick things up as easily.
30:45
Sarah McKay: And we do know that there are some neurological differences between these kids.
30:50
Sarah McKay: But we couldn't scan their brain and go, that kid is gonna be good at maths.
30:54
Sarah McKay: So some of it is around things like, almost like your ability to pay attention and then your working memory.
31:00
Sarah McKay: So working memory is the ability to kind of hold ideas kind of in your mind.
31:04
Sarah McKay: Like, do mental arithmetic, do mental maths.
31:07
Sarah McKay: There are differences between people in terms of their working memory, and we know working memory improves all the way through childhood and into adolescence.
31:14
Sarah McKay: And some kids are gonna have a very good working memory, so they can hold complex ideas in their mind and manipulate ideas, and they find learning easy and other kids don't.
31:23
Sarah McKay: But we've got a layer on top of that then what those experiences feel like.
31:28
Sarah McKay: How that may or may not make us feel motivated to do more.
31:33
Sarah McKay: And we can neuroscience this as well, right?
31:35
Sarah McKay: So people are often wanting to talk about dopamine.
31:37
Sarah McKay: Say you like go to school, and you just find learning really easy and it's fun and it's engaging and it's enjoyable, and so you're getting lots of reward and feedback and it's just all going very well, you're having all of these great learning experiences, and dopamine is going to be part of that.
31:51
Sarah McKay: 'Cause dopamine is a learning molecule, and it teaches you what's great, I love that, I'm gonna go and do that again.
31:57
Sarah McKay: 'Cause the brain is just this learning machine, and dopamine is the signaling molecule that says, Hey, that was a really good experience, I'm going to do it again and again and again.
32:06
Vanessa Vakharia: Like a Pavlov thing.
32:07
Sarah McKay: Yeah.
32:08
Sarah McKay: But dopamine, It's also like the molecule of disappointment.
32:11
Sarah McKay: So if you have an experience, it's just hard, oh, that sucked, well then your brain, dopamine is signaling to your brain, well you want to avoid that'cause that didn't feel great, so you don't wanna do it again.
32:23
Sarah McKay: And then you've got a kid in a classroom that is just having these constant experiences of disappointment and failure and not enjoying it.
32:30
Sarah McKay: And then you've got the social context of that as well,'cause they're learning in a social environment.
32:37
Sarah McKay: And kids are pretty good at knowing where they sit kind of in the learning rankings of a class.
32:43
Sarah McKay: Maybe they shouldn't, but they, like I,
32:45
Vanessa Vakharia: They know
32:45
Sarah McKay: I see kids.
32:46
Sarah McKay: They know.
32:47
Sarah McKay: So, it's almost like a snowball effect, whereas kids have great experiences, so they're gonna want more experiences and so things become easier and they enjoy that process.
32:56
Sarah McKay: And other kids it sucked, I don't wanna do it again, I don't wanna go.
33:00
Vanessa Vakharia: Well and if they don't do it again, they're not going to get better at it.
33:03
Sarah McKay: Yeah.
33:04
Sarah McKay: And we, we must realize that the signaling in the brain is signaling disappointment and is signaling aversion.
33:09
Sarah McKay: Like, I just don't want to do that.
33:11
Sarah McKay: I don't wanna do that.
33:12
Sarah McKay: And so if you don't have great experiences of say, learning maths early on, it doesn't feel great when you are learning maths.
33:18
Sarah McKay: You don't want to go and learn it, and it almost becomes this kind of reinforcement.
33:23
Sarah McKay: Um, so there's lots of kind of components that are coming into a little brain.
33:27
Vanessa Vakharia: I like this kind of angle that I haven't heard before, which is some brains, let's say, have a me make sure I'm paraphrasing right.
33:34
Vanessa Vakharia: Some brains have a predisposition to, you're saying, enjoy learning more, but I'm almost gonna take it to like, enjoy school learning more.
33:43
Vanessa Vakharia: who like are quote unquote bad in school are like phenomenally brilliant in all these other ways.
33:49
Vanessa Vakharia: So I feel like it's the structure of how we are taught in school.
33:54
Vanessa Vakharia: But then what I'm curious about is I have so many parents and students that will say, my kid is getting like an A in every single thing, but it's math, you know, they just don't have a math brain.
34:05
Vanessa Vakharia: They're getting like, A's across the board, but it's this math.
34:08
Vanessa Vakharia: But now you're making me think, well if the predisposition to learning, let's just call it that for now, has to do with working memory, for example, you would imagine that math and science are two areas in which working memory would be the most beneficial.
34:22
Vanessa Vakharia: And I will say most of my kids who are, uh, diagnosed with learning differences and have resources in math class, it will often be about working memory, where they'll be allowed access to a formula sheet, something like that.
34:34
Vanessa Vakharia: And perhaps you just don't need that as much when it comes to English or something.
34:38
Vanessa Vakharia: So like that's a lot to think about actually.
34:40
Vanessa Vakharia: it's not specifically a math brain
34:41
Sarah McKay: And working memory is almost like the engine of it all.
34:44
Sarah McKay: And I mean, attention is related to this because attention is how much information we take in and how much we filter out.
34:51
Sarah McKay: And kids with attentional problems, there's so much information coming in, their working memory just simply can't hold all of that.
34:57
Sarah McKay: So we need to one, manage, help manage their attention, and then support their working memory.
35:03
Sarah McKay: And I often say working memory, it's not like, especially during childhood, it's not as much of a muscle as it is like a, a kind of a bone.
35:11
Sarah McKay: And that we can't necessarily work it, work it, work it, work it and easily improve it, like we strengthen it like a muscle.
35:18
Sarah McKay: It's more like a bone and that we've gotta kind of support its growth and it will eventually kind of grow, but there will be kind of differences I suppose.
35:27
Sarah McKay: And, there are biological differences in brains that are underpinning working memory.
35:32
Vanessa Vakharia: You're saying like working memory is about this idea of holding information.
35:36
Vanessa Vakharia: You know, math requires, has traditionally required, let me just make that clear, so much memorization and like mental this and that.
35:43
Vanessa Vakharia: So for educators to know is we're trying to move away from that in math education, right?
35:48
Vanessa Vakharia: And say, fuck it.
35:49
Vanessa Vakharia: Like, why do you need to memorize a formulary or memorize an algorithm?
35:52
Vanessa Vakharia: Would that be a strategy to help those kids if we were teaching math in this different way?
35:57
Sarah McKay: I think the point of memorizing things and knowing things by rote, like timestables, and I know, like I learned my timestables by rote and so did my husband, but they don't, my kids didn't learn timestables by rote.
36:09
Sarah McKay: So me and my husband are actually quicker at that because we learn them just like by rote, which I think is useful.
36:14
Sarah McKay: They learned a strategy to cal to work the, the, the number out instead of just learning it by rote.
36:19
Sarah McKay: And I think that there is a benefit to learning things by rote because essentially it becomes what we would call a habit or it's automated.
36:26
Sarah McKay: Because that's freeing up your working memory.
36:29
Sarah McKay: It's, it's automated within you.
36:30
Sarah McKay: It's like riding a bike.
36:31
Sarah McKay: It's like typing on a computer.
36:33
Sarah McKay: You don't have to hold it in your mind.
36:37
Sarah McKay: It just, you've learned that.
36:39
Sarah McKay: So it is, it's like learning to read, right?
36:42
Sarah McKay: So I do think that there is a benefit for some things being taught so you've learned it and memorized it by rote.
36:49
Sarah McKay: Because when your brain masters a skill, it puts it in a different part of the brain.
36:55
Sarah McKay: It puts it in a part of the brain called the striation, which is involved with sort of storing automated learned behaviors, learning learned habits, learning to ride a bike, you know, playing, playing music, typing on a keyboard.
37:07
Sarah McKay: Also things like your times tables.
37:09
Sarah McKay: And that means you can free up your working memory to problem solve and to deal with what's right in front of you.
37:14
Vanessa Vakharia: And I think that's, that's also like, I don't know if you know how hot a topic this is that you've just touched on.
37:19
Vanessa Vakharia: Like there are
37:20
Sarah McKay: No, I have no idea.
37:21
Vanessa Vakharia: Okay, well you're, you're wading, I'm gonna take you out of here gently because you're waiting into literal what is called the math wars in the United States and it's
37:29
Sarah McKay: Right.
37:29
Vanessa Vakharia: And it's not a place you wanna be.
37:30
Sarah McKay: Is someone gonna come after me on Ins, on my Instagram?
37:32
Vanessa Vakharia: Probably, like they're coming after me already, so like, don't worry we're in this together.
37:36
Vanessa Vakharia: What's interesting is I think we're kind of in the same place of what you're wanting, what we're all wanting is fact fluency.
37:41
Vanessa Vakharia: It's like to be able to access that without any effort, any cognitive load, like
37:46
Sarah McKay: 3 times
37:46
Vanessa Vakharia: 3 you're
37:46
Sarah McKay: not working
37:47
Vanessa Vakharia: out, you know, it's nine.
37:48
Vanessa Vakharia: But I love what you're saying.
37:49
Vanessa Vakharia: 'cause this is exactly what I'm saying.
37:50
Vanessa Vakharia: It's how it gets there might need to differ by kid
37:55
Sarah McKay: A hundred percent.
37:56
Sarah McKay: Yep.
37:57
Sarah McKay: Yep.
37:57
Sarah McKay: Yeah, I mean, we were just, back in the day, back in the eighties, we just said our times tables, we just said them over and over and over and over and over and over again.
38:05
Vanessa Vakharia: Well it's just it caused so much math trauma, this method for so many people, that now we need it in there.
38:11
Vanessa Vakharia: But so many people, that was the point where they got turned off of math.
38:14
Vanessa Vakharia: Like the public shame, the embarassment, not being fast enough, maybe what you're talking about too, some kids that are not predisposed to actually get those facts in there that way.
38:23
Vanessa Vakharia: I mean we could do another whole episode, but we have to wrap up, I'm so sorry.
38:27
Vanessa Vakharia: But I you something first, I need to know if there is a left brain or right brain when people are like, I need to know.
38:34
Sarah McKay: Yeah.
38:34
Sarah McKay: I mean, there is literally like a left side of the brain and a right side, a right side of the brain.
38:39
Sarah McKay: So there are some tasks that the brain does and processes are, are what we would call lateralized or perhaps, you know, the back half of the brain absolutely processes vision, and the left back half of the brain, the left occipital lobe processes vision from the right eye and vice versa.
38:58
Sarah McKay: So the, movements in your left side of the body are processed by the right hand side of your brain.
39:03
Sarah McKay: So there is, so it crosses over.
39:05
Vanessa Vakharia: Stop.
39:05
Vanessa Vakharia: You can't just say that casually.
39:07
Vanessa Vakharia: Why?
39:08
Vanessa Vakharia: Oh my God.
39:08
Vanessa Vakharia: We don't have time for this, but I need to know, how
39:10
Sarah McKay: That's what ha it just all crosses over, kind of near, near the top of the spinal cord, that everything sort of crosses over to the other side.
39:17
Sarah McKay: I dunno, I'm not sure whether anyone's figured out why that has happened or why, why brains have evolved that way.
39:23
Vanessa Vakharia: Is this common knowledge?
39:24
Sarah McKay: It's kind of like neuroscience 101, but like if anyone's ever had a stroke, say, um, or brain damage, they would know that like perhaps they have a stroke in like the motor cortex or the sensory cortex on the right hand side of the brain, it's gonna affect the left hand side of their body.
39:40
Vanessa Vakharia: What the fuck are you saying?
39:41
Vanessa Vakharia: This is the craziest thing I've learned today.
39:45
Sarah McKay: Does that mean that there, that one, one type of thinking is done on one side of the brain and another type of thinking is, and we do see lateralization of perhaps language centers of the brain are more likely to be on the left hand side of your brain in a right-handed person.
40:01
Sarah McKay: And if you're left-handed, often in the right hand side of the brain, but not on everyone, it's not like a hundred percent complete separation.
40:07
Sarah McKay: Sometimes it's on opposite sides.
40:09
Sarah McKay: And so say someone was having brain surgery, they might have to map that out for that individual person to figure out, this part of the brain here, what's its kind of main job.
40:19
Sarah McKay: But does that mean that we are born with a brain whereby everything on the right hand side is around creative thinking and everything on the left hand side, there, there may be some lateralization of function there, but that doesn't mean that you are that kind of person and you can't access the other side of your brain and that determines who you are and, and how things come about.
40:40
Sarah McKay: Creativity requires the whole brain.
40:43
Sarah McKay: And, you know, someone could be a creative mathematician, right?
40:46
Sarah McKay: You could come up with loads of creative ways to problem solve using maths.
40:50
Vanessa Vakharia: Math is creative by nature,
40:52
Sarah McKay: Yeah it is.
40:53
Sarah McKay: So, and how do we even define creativity, right?
40:55
Sarah McKay: It's kind of coming up with ideas that no one else has.
40:57
Sarah McKay: People often think about this, like, you've got this kind of artist who, you know, who's painting pictures or a Taylor Swift, you know, she's so creative that the left side of her brain is not functioning, and you could never possibly do maths with that.
41:10
Sarah McKay: That's not what we are seeing.
41:14
Vanessa Vakharia: But is the more mathy stuff on the left side of the brain?
41:16
Vanessa Vakharia: Like is that even true?
41:17
Sarah McKay: So we've got different, I mean, if you're thinking about what's, what's required to do maths, there's not a maths node in the brain in the same way that we've got kind of language processing.
41:28
Sarah McKay: There's lots of different brain areas which are involved here because perhaps it's gonna require you to be visualizing things kind of in your mind's eye, which is gonna require your visual cortex.
41:39
Sarah McKay: 'Cause you're literally actually having to see things, it's gonna require prefrontal cortical functions like working memory or problem solving or decision making or strategizing.
41:49
Sarah McKay: And also parts of the brain, which are halfway between the back and the front, parietal cortex and parts of that are involved with integrating different sort of sensory modalities to kind of form a single percept or a single idea.
42:02
Sarah McKay: So a maths concept might be a combination of, of something visual and something language, and perhaps something, you know, sort of spatial.
42:13
Sarah McKay: So we've got lots of brain networks, which are involved in maths problems.
42:18
Sarah McKay: How efficient those brain networks are, and how well organized is partly biological, but it's also partly how you've learned to use those parts of the brain.
42:30
Sarah McKay: And we see that vary across people.
42:33
Vanessa Vakharia: Okay.
42:33
Vanessa Vakharia: This has been so amazing.
42:34
Vanessa Vakharia: I can't even, I like, I don't even know what I'm more, most blown away from, but this whole like doing things from different sides of the, like the left to the right.
42:41
Vanessa Vakharia: Okay.
42:42
Vanessa Vakharia: I'm gonna ask you the final two questions we ask everyone, and then sadly we have to close off because I have a million more questions that are now getting quite personal.
42:49
Vanessa Vakharia: Um, okay.
42:51
Vanessa Vakharia: like, oh my God.
42:52
Vanessa Vakharia: Now I need to know this.
42:53
Vanessa Vakharia: Okay.
42:54
Vanessa Vakharia: First question is, if you could pick one thing you'd like to see change around the way math is taught in schools, what would it be?
43:01
Sarah McKay: It would be that we stop unintentionally talking about maths being a boy thing that girls can also do.
43:09
Sarah McKay: That we change the water that kids are swimming in and we say girls and boys have equal potential to do maths.
43:17
Sarah McKay: We're not using language that makes it sound like maths is something girls opt into.
43:22
Vanessa Vakharia: I love this.
43:23
Vanessa Vakharia: I love this.
43:24
Vanessa Vakharia: It's also something we can all do right now.
43:26
Sarah McKay: Girls can do maths too", is not the message that we want to give.
43:30
Sarah McKay: That sounds good.
43:31
Sarah McKay: It sounds, you know well-meaning, but girls can do maths too, sounds like it's a boy thing that girls can do too.
43:38
Sarah McKay: So we're opting the girls in.
43:40
Sarah McKay: We need to not even be using language like that whatsoever.
43:43
Sarah McKay: Everyone has equal potential to learn to do maths.
43:46
Sarah McKay: Biological sex doesn't matter.
43:48
Vanessa Vakharia: Done.
43:49
Vanessa Vakharia: And the final question is, what would you say to someone who just says, Sarah, great podcast, this was so fascinating, however, I'm just not a math person.
43:58
Sarah McKay: I mean, I suppose if that's the language that you want to define yourself by, that there are some things that you can do and some things that you can't do, and you are an adult well, like, carry on, right.
44:08
Sarah McKay: I, I just,
44:10
Vanessa Vakharia: Best answer.
44:11
Vanessa Vakharia: I love
44:11
Sarah McKay: you, you, you do you sounds like a you problem.
44:16
Sarah McKay: What I would do, can, what I would say is let's try our damnedest to not fuck the kids up by presenting those ideas to them.
44:29
Vanessa Vakharia: I love that.
44:30
Sarah McKay: Because we've gotta intervene.
44:32
Sarah McKay: We've gotta intervene as soon as they start school.
44:35
Sarah McKay: The French have shown us that.
44:37
Vanessa Vakharia: The French do so much better, including apparently this.
44:41
Vanessa Vakharia: So bread, cigarettes, wine, and now math studies.
44:44
Vanessa Vakharia: Way to go.
44:45
Sarah McKay: All my favorite things.
44:47
Vanessa Vakharia: All my favorite things.
44:48
Vanessa Vakharia: Okay.
44:48
Vanessa Vakharia: Um, this has been so incredible.
44:50
Vanessa Vakharia: Is there anything you want us, like anything you're like, you know what, if you like this, here's where to find me, here's what to get.
44:55
Vanessa Vakharia: Like plug your stuff at this point.
44:56
Sarah McKay: Oh yeah.
44:57
Sarah McKay: Like if, you know this, so I teach courses in applied neuroscience and brain health across the lifespan.
45:02
Sarah McKay: I've got a basic kind of training on neuroscience, kind of like neuroscience 1 0 1, but let's make it meaningful and useful.
45:10
Sarah McKay: sarahmckay.com.
45:11
Sarah McKay: I've got a few different books on women's brain health and brain health in general.
45:16
Sarah McKay: And follow me on Instagram.
45:17
Vanessa Vakharia: Follow her on Insta.
45:18
Vanessa Vakharia: That's amazing.
45:20
Vanessa Vakharia: From Mel Robbins to Math Therapy.
45:23
Vanessa Vakharia: It's, you're, you're only going up
45:25
Sarah McKay: going up and up and up.
45:27
Vanessa Vakharia: Thank you so much for being on the podcast.
45:28
Vanessa Vakharia: It has been so amazing.
45:29
Vanessa Vakharia: I've learned so much thank you for joining me.
45:31
Vanessa Vakharia: Bye.
45:32
Sarah McKay: Bye.
45:36
Vanessa Vakharia: I am so glad I finally had a full on neuroscientist on the podcast to put the myth of the math person to rest.
45:41
Vanessa Vakharia: We're done.
45:42
Vanessa Vakharia: It's over.
45:43
Vanessa Vakharia: And I never want to hear about it again.
45:45
Vanessa Vakharia: Wishful thinking, I know.
45:47
Vanessa Vakharia: But if you're anything like me, as you were listening to the episode, you were like.
45:51
Vanessa Vakharia: Oh my God.
45:52
Vanessa Vakharia: I need to send this to like cousin Larry who keeps claiming that boys just have more natural ability or Yes, I finally have proof to send to like so-and-so's parents so they can stop claiming they pass the math gene onto their kid.
46:06
Vanessa Vakharia: My advice guys, send them this episode.
46:08
Vanessa Vakharia: Do it now before you forget.
46:10
Vanessa Vakharia: It might be the thing they need to hear to finally let go of the math myths holding them and the people around them back.
46:17
Vanessa Vakharia: Now, did Dr.
46:18
Vanessa Vakharia: Sarah McKay say anything that like shocked you?
46:20
Vanessa Vakharia: Because if she did, I wanna know.
46:22
Vanessa Vakharia: Text the podcast by hitting the link in your podcast app.
46:25
Vanessa Vakharia: DM me on Instagram at the Math Guru, or email me at vanessa@themathguru.ca.
46:31
Vanessa Vakharia: Math Therapy is produced by David Kochberg.
46:33
Vanessa Vakharia: The music you're hearing right now is by our band, Goodnight Sunrise.
46:36
Vanessa Vakharia: I'm your host, Vanessa Vakharia, and thank you so much for being here and being open-minded.
46:41
Vanessa Vakharia: Yes, that is another bad brain joke.
46:43
Vanessa Vakharia: But for real.
46:44
Vanessa Vakharia: The more we learn, the more we learn how much more we have left to learn.
46:47
Vanessa Vakharia: I made that up and that's a beautiful thing.
46:50
Vanessa Vakharia: The world could use a little more of that right now, so thank you for being a part of the change we all wish and need to see.
46:56
Vanessa Vakharia: Until next week.
46:57
Vanessa Vakharia: Xo.
46:57
Vanessa Vakharia: Xo.