Is your brain wired for maths?
February 25th 2008 22:18
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Severe acalculia is a general term for any one of several deficits in number processing.
Neuroscientist Dehane found that a brain injured patient, when asked to add 2 and 2, he answered “three.” He could still count and recite a sequence like 2, 4, 6, 8, but he was incapable of counting downward from 9, differentiating odd and even numbers, or recognizing the numeral 5 when it was flashed in front of him.
To Dehaene, these impairments were less interesting than the fragmentary capabilities Mr. N had managed to retain. When he was shown the numeral 5 for a few seconds, he knew it was a numeral rather than a letter and, by counting up from 1 until he got to the right integer, he eventually identified it as a 5. He did the same thing when asked the age of his seven-year-old daughter. In the 1997 book “The Number Sense,” Dehaene wrote, “He appears to know right from the start what quantities he wishes to express, but reciting the number series seems to be his only means of retrieving the corresponding word.”
Dehaene dubbed Mr. N “the Approximate Man.” The Approximate Man lived in a world where a year comprised “about 350 days” and an hour “about fifty minutes,” where there were five seasons, and where a dozen eggs amounted to “six or ten.” Dehaene asked him to add 2 and 2 several times and received answers ranging from three to five. But, he noted, “he never offers a result as absurd as 9.”
In cognitive science, incidents of brain damage are nature’s experiments. If a lesion knocks out one ability but leaves another intact, it is evidence that they are wired into different neural circuits. In this instance, Dehaene theorized that our ability to learn sophisticated mathematical procedures resided in an entirely different part of the brain from a rougher quantitative sense. Over the decades, evidence concerning cognitive deficits in brain-damaged patients has accumulated, and researchers have concluded that we have a sense of number that is independent of language, memory, and reasoning in general.
Adapted from the New Yorker - Are our brains wired for math?
by Jim Holt
So for those who always claim they can't do maths it appears this cognitive function exists separately from others, but most will not experience the extreme deficits of this brain injured patient and are probably much better equipped to do maths than they think, practise and perserverance should overcome a lot of the difficulty.
Inability to do maths is, in my opinion, a cognitive impairment, but not one which cannot be overcome for those willing to stick to pushing their brains in this direction a little harder.
Rocket scientist you may never be, but most people aren't but it will perhaps lift your self esteem if you were to become rather more competent in this area.
How do you Feel about that????????
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Comment by Krystal
feelings