Flunking at Math

There are primitive tribes whose members cannot count past three. Within their own environment, they function well. A member of a modern industrial society with that incapacity would be diagnosed with dyscalculia--analogous to dyslexia. Not surprisingly, there are specific regions of the brain that must function well to avoid dyscalculia--just as specific brain dysfunction is responsible for dyslexia.

This physorg.com news report discusses the research that located the dyscalculia brain regions, using brain imaging.


It is the discovery of the part responsible for counting or numerosity that is a major finding for Professor Brian Butterworth, who also published ‘The Mathematical Brain’ and is an authority on dyscalculia. He believes his finding is the key to diagnosis of dyscalculia.

Professor Butterworth, of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, said: “Now that we know where to look for the differences in brain activation between those who suffer from dyscalculia and those who don’t have the learning disorder, we will be able to come up with better diagnosis and insights.

“Some years ago, my colleague, Professor Uta Frith, found the part of the brain responsible for dyslexia. That discovery has led to a much better understanding of the condition, promising better diagnosis and treatment. We hope our discovery will lead to similar insights into dyscalculia – a similar learning disability but one that is still relatively unknown to the general public.”

.... Professor Butterworth said: “There are two ways of counting things. Imagine assessing how many men versus women are in a room by counting them at the door as they enter the room, let’s say three women and four men, and then try assessing the difference by looking at the room when everyone is present. Both methods of assessing the number of people should produce the same result. Instead of assessing numbers of men and women, subjects saw blue and green squares shown in a sequence or blue and green squares shown on screen at the same time. We found that both methods activated the same brain region.

“But when we showed subjects the colours merged and appearing either as a continuously changing square or as one cloudy coloured rectangle different results were produced and a different brain network lit up. This is because the brain was no longer able to try to count the objects. Instead it had to assess how much colour was in the block and guess whether there was more of one colour or another.

“By comparing these two types of stimulus, we identified the brain activity specific to estimating numbers of things. We think this is a brain network that underlies arithmetic and may be abnormal in dyscalculics.”

Read more here.

In the modern world, a person without basic counting skills is lost. Fortunately, most people are able to count change from a purchase, and pay their bills accurately. More advanced math skills are going to be more difficult to locate with brain imaging, but perhaps not impossible. Real time functional brain imaging is still in its early stages. There is much more to learn about functional brain locations and interaction between brain centers.

Our interest here at this blog is generally in the more advanced math skills necessary for scientific and technological progress. A shortage of those skills in a society would leave it helpless before the future. Statistically, more males score in the upper tail of the distribution in math than females, particularly at the very highest levels. A woman has not won the highest math honor, the Fields Medal. Most top professors of math and physics at the elite schools are men, as expected from the research. It would be best if we could keep politics out of this matter, since the scientific and technological challenges to society are so pressing. Unfortunately, the Lawrence Summers affair illustrates the type of self-defeating and vicious infighting that continues to waste so many resources.