Benefiting at work from Brain Based Insights

I just read an interesting news piece at Daily Science News called Chinese, English Speakers Vary at Math . The story quoted from Associated Press:

“Things add up differently for native English speakers compared with people who learned Chinese as a first language.”

How do they know?

Through brain imaging researchers observed parts of the brain that were active while people did simple addition problems, such as 3 plus 4 equals 7. Participants all worked with Arabic numerals which are used similarly in both cultures.

Interestingly “both groups engaged a portion of the brain called the inferior parietal cortex, which is involved in quantity representation and reading.”

But native English speakers also showed activity in a language processing area of the brain, while native Chinese speakers used a brain region involved in the processing of visual information, according to the report in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers concluded that this difference "may mean that Chinese speakers perform problems in a different manner than do English speakers," said lead author Yiyuan Tang of Dalian University of Technology in Dalian, .

My question is “How can these and other cultural differences with numbers ... help us to calculate in new ways? Remember Einstein’s teacher called him a bonehead ... because he calculated more through pictures than through traditional number patterns…. What do you think?