In his new popular science book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell of Blink and The Tipping Point fame takes on the task of explaining Asian math test scores and ends up in China's rice paddies. Drawing on the research of University of Michigan professor Richard Nisbett, Gladwell argues that rice agriculture is unique for being labor intensive, allowing for multiple growing seasons, and requiring attention to minute details such as paddy design and water levels (Disclaimer: I graduated from the same department at Michigan, often doing research in cross-cultural psychology, although not with Dr. Nisbett directly). Western agriculture, by contrast, was characterized by dependence on rainfall, long periods of rest between growing seasons, and cultivation of large plots of land that didn't require as much attention to minute details, often with the aid of mechanical developments.

Farmers in feudal Chinese society were also allowed to keep any harvest past a fixed tax, providing incentive for farmers to tweak their paddies for higher yields. Russian feudal society, by contrast, gave peasants, he writes, "no reason to believe in the efficacy of their work." The result, argues Gladwell, is that rice-based societies have a profound emphasis on careful attention to minute details and the relationship between hard work and reward--skills perfect for math.

Gladwell also notes work that argues the way numbers and mathematical concepts are rendered in Chinese is much more intuitive than the ways of Western languages. English, for example, uses contradictory systems for some numbers going from 'twenty-one,' starting from the tens digit, to 'nineteen' where the last digit is placed at the front. Chinese, by contrast, has none of these peculiarities; 'nineteen' is simply 'ten-nine' and 'twenty-one' is 'two-ten-one.' "That difference," Gladwell writes, "means that Asian children learn to count much faster than American children."

Strangely enough, Chinese short-term memory for numbers may even be longer than Westerners' because short-term memory is based on language loops of 2 seconds and Chinese numbers are faster to pronounce than English numbers. Cantonese numbers, according to research, are some of the world's briefest, allowing speakers to hold about 10 numbers in short-term memory, much more than English allows.

So the next time you ride past fields of rice paddies, you may feel a little better about your C in high school algebra.