http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/05/12/MN28876.DTL
This is an interesting article on brain activity doing math.
The brain has the natural ability to do math at birth, which most of us lose because we never use it. It is what we use to reason approximations. There is another part of the brain where we are taught language of math. We use this part most of the time but it is not the part we are born with our instinct ability to do math. My take on this is children at an early age should be taught math by the dots to use the knowledge we are born with.