Mar 22, 2007
Stimulating dyscalculia adds up
An international team of scientists have discovered that the brain’s right parietal lobe is responsible for the disorder, dyscalculia, a kind of numerical dyslexia. The discovery made by researchers at University College London, University of the Negev, Israel, Birkbeck Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, London, Maastricht University, Netherlands, and the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Germany, could ultimately lead to new methods of diagnosis and management of the disorder through remedial teaching.
Dyscalculia is as common as dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) with about one in twenty people affected. However, dyscalculia has been given little regard in the mainstream despite its potentially debilitating impact on quality of life. Roi Cohen Kadosh, of UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience explains the implications of his study, which involved inducing dyscalculia: “This is the first causal demonstration that the parietal lobe is the key to understanding developmental dyscalculia,” he explains, “Most people process numbers very easily – almost automatically – but people with dyscalculia do not.” The team stimulated for a few milliseconds the right parietal lobes of volunteers carrying out an arithmetic test, using neuronavigated transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) . The stimulation essentially knocked out activity in that part of the brain and left the volunteers unable to react as quickly to the test.
“This provides strong evidence that dyscalculia is caused by malformations in the right parietal lobe and provides sold grounds for further study on the physical abnormalities present in dyscalculics’ brains,” adds Cohen Kadosh, “It’s an important step to the ultimate goal of early diagnosis through analysis of neural tissue, which in turn will lead to earlier treatments and more effective remedial teaching.”
The researchers will publish details of their findings in the April 17 issue of the journal Current Biology
I don’t think anyone was trying to say it is not a real disorder. The research on which I reported is there to try and help medical science understand the problem and partly to make the disorder widely known. Dyscalculia is not the more common and annoying generic innumeracy and (scientific illiteracy) on which many the reputation of many a fool rests (particularly in government and the civil service, where having an arts degree and feigning complete ignorance of mathematics and science seems to be the only way to get on. Imagine, a science PhD or a mathematician running a trade or industry department, for instance!
err… dyscalculia already is a real disorder.
Better to be innumerate than ignorant.
As of figuring out tips and make change, it doesn’t mean I can’t do that… only it’s the other one who complains! ;)
More likely evoking dyscalculia will now be the default excuse for those types.
Yes, there are rather a lot of people who seem to wear their innumeracy and scientific illiteracy as a badge of honour
We might hope that if dyscalculia becomes widely known as a real disorder, those annoying people who are mere innumerates will quit flaunting and bragging about their inability to figure tips and make change.