Word: cohens
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...even small ones, easily. Though you may have never heard of it, the condition is much more than being bad at math. "You need to hear people suffering from dyscalculia, how hard it is for them to do everyday things, just going to the shop, counting change," says Roi Cohen Kadosh, a research fellow at University College London (UCL). Other practical impossibilities for dyscalculics: balancing a checkbook, planning for retirement, being a baseball fan. The list goes...
...Cohen Kadosh may not have the solution, but it turns out he does have a pretty good grasp of the problem. For the first time ever, he and others at UCL have figured out how to induce dyscalculia - temporarily - in people with normal mathematical ability. That may not sound very useful. But in doing so, the UCL researchers have pinpointed the part of the brain they believe is responsible for humans' intuitive sense of magnitude - or what makes a number...
...Cohen Kadosh took five volunteers with normal math abilities through more than 500 trials. In an experiment published this month in Current Biology, he targeted different regions of the test subjects' brains with magnetic pulses while they performed number-recognition problems. A normal subject, when asked to identify whether a 2 or a 4 is written in larger text, will be a split-second faster on those occasions that the 4 is printed bigger. Normal subjects process that 4 is a bigger quantity than 2, and that information aids their pick - just as number recognition slows them down slightly when...
...grasp of numbers. It's fascinating, both because it reduces a serious learning disability to the mere flick of a neural switch and because, by doing so, it holds out a tantalizing possibility that one day a cure may be as simple as flicking that switch in reverse. Cohen Kadosh hopes the result will allow scientists to develop a diagnostic tool for dyscalculia based on neuroimaging. Identifying children with developmental dyscalculia would let parents intervene earlier to teach important math concepts, just as they can intervene today to help dyslexic children read better...
...years ago," says Mahesh Sharma, a professor of mathematics education at Cambridge College in Massachusetts. Indeed, even the definition is a bit fuzzy. Some researchers count disabilities in spatial perception or arithmetic operations as dyscalculia, while others restrict it to difficulty recognizing numbers normally. Cohen Kadosh's tests hold out the possibility that different math dysfunctions could well be processed elsewhere in the brain. "I won't say this study provides all the answers," says Sharma. Definitely not, but at least it helps show why, for some, two plus two equals trouble...