WASHINGTON: The right parietal lobe in the brain is responsible for dyscalculia, the mathematics learning disorder, according to scientists at the University College London. The study may provide a better understanding of the condition, and lead to better diagnosis and treatment.

“This is the first causal demonstration that the parietal lobe is the key to understanding developmental dyscalculia. Most people process numbers very easily almost automatically but people with dyscalculia do not.

We wanted to find out what would happen when the areas relevant to maths learning in the right parietal lobes were effectively knocked out for several hundred milliseconds.

We found that stimulation to this brain region during a maths test radically impacted on the subjects’ reaction time,” said Roi Cohen Kadosh, of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.

“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.

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,” Kadosh added.

The researchers used neuronavigated transcranial magnatic stimulation (TMS) to stimulate the brain, through which they were able to bring about dyscalculia in normal subjects for a short time.

The effect of TMS lasted only a few hundred milliseconds in the subjects, and was brought on just at the point when the subject had to evaluate the numbers and decide which had the greater value or which was physically bigger.

The test was designed to measure the subjects’ automatic processing of numbers, and was rolled out to both people with the dysfunction and those without it.—Dawn/The Times of India News Service