There's a youtube video of John Conway pondering a move in some graphical game, with scalp wired up to a bunch of electrodes. It's not very informative, but might lead further. WFL On 2/10/16, James Propp <jamespropp@gmail.com> wrote:

Has anyone used brain-imaging to figure out which brain-regions get repurposed when the owner of a brain decides to use that brain for off-label purposes like thinking about mathematical objects, proofs, etc.?

I've often suspected that sensory and motor circuits in my brain are involved when I do math, and it would be neat if there were neurological data to back up my suspicions that (for instance) when I'm following a logical argument that binds epsilon, and then binds delta, and then unbinds them, the feeling that I'm "submerging" and then "emerging" is not just a subjective feeling but part of the anatomical substrate of my experience.

Are there books about this sort of thing? I gather that George Lakoff tries to think about this stuff, but I went to a talk of his a few years ago, and I got the feeling he didn't really understand math at a deep enough level to have worthwhile insights. He was all caught up in trying to understand how the brain processes Godel's Theorem, which is a very atypical piece of mathematical cognition. He also didn't seem very interested in input from the mathematicians who attended his talk (me included), which made me skeptical.

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