For instance, Chinese children have an edge in learning to count, simply because their number syntax is so much simpler. But, I hasten to say, so does better organization in Asian classrooms, as shown by UCLA psychologist Jim Stigler. As children move on to higher mathematics, there is considerable evidence that moving beyond approximation to learn exact calculation is very difficult for children and quite taxing even for the adult brain, and that strategies and education have a crucial impact. Sadly enough, innumeracy may be our normal human condition, and it takes us considerable effort to become numerate. Indeed, a lot can be explained about the failure of some children at school, and about the extraordinary success of some idiot savants in calculation, by appealing to differences in the amount of investment and in the affective state which they are in when they learn mathematics.
Education is the key, and positive affect is the engine behind success in math.
The existence of mathematical prodigies might seem to go against this view. Their performance seems so otherworldly that they seem to have a different brain from our own. Whatever is different in their adult brains is the result of successful education, strategies, and memorization. Indeed, all of their feats, from root extraction to multidigit multiplication, can be explained by simple tricks that any human brain can learn, if one were willing to make the effort. It is the smallest number that can be expressed in two different ways as a sum of two cubes.