Meanwhile, using a different part of the brain, the developing baby is busy, listening, sorting and noticing patterns in language. The human child develops a mapping between the process of counting and the poem ‘one, two, three, four, …’. The uniquely human part of the counting process appears to be the ability to represent larger quantities exactly, and to develop a concept of number in the abstract. Where most animals use the prefrontal area of brain for better developed sensory-motor abilities, humans have developed high-order and symbolic thinking. This allows us to learn to extend our ability to subitize in order to reason about larger numbers like 100 or a million.

There are many ways in which the process of developing number sense can go wrong. For many people, the negative experience (bordering on panic) of expectations beyond their capability results in a flooding of emotion into the parts of the brain needed for number. So some difficulty experienced in learning mathematics can be attributed to anxiety. Hence some difficulty experienced in learning mathematics can be attributed to anxiety.

There is need for a great many more studies in this area to develop a fuller understanding. In the meantime, teachers are already being encouraged to use a mixture of visual, auditory and kinaesthetic approaches to number and the rest of us need to learn to approach number with calm, using any approach that works for us!

Further reading
Butterworth, B. (1999) The Mathematical Brain, London: Macmillan.
Dehaene, S. (1997) The Number Sense: How the mind creates mathematics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lakoff G. and Nunez R. E. (2000) Where mathematics comes from: how the embodied mind brings mathematics into being, New York: Basic Books.
Mason J. and Johnston-Wilder S. (2004) Fundamental Constructs in Mathematics Education, London: RoutledgeFalmer.

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Content last updated: 05/01/2005

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