Dyscalculia was originally identified, in case studies, with patients who suffered specific arithmetic disabilities as a result of damage to specific regions of the brain. Recent research suggests that dyscalculia can also occur developmentally, as a genetically-linked learning disability which affects a person’s ability to understand, remember, or manipulate numbers or number facts (e.g., the multiplication tables). The term is often used to refer specifically to the inability to perform arithmetic operations, but it is also defined by some educational professionals and cognitive psychologists as a more fundamental inability to conceptualize numbers as abstract concepts of comparative quantities (a deficit in “number sense”). Those who argue for this more-constrained definition of dyscalculia sometimes prefer to use the technical term “Arithmetic Difficulties” (AD) to refer to calculation and number memory deficits.
Dyscalculia is a lesser known disability, similar and potentially related to dyslexia and developmental dyspraxia. Dyscalculia occurs in people across the whole IQ range, and sufferers often, but not always, also have difficulties with time, measurement, and spatial reasoning. Current estimates suggest it may affect about 5% of the population. […]
Potential symptoms
Frequent difficulties with arithmetic, confusing the signs: +, −, ÷ and ×.
Difficulty with everyday tasks like checking change and reading analog clocks.
Inability to comprehend financial planning or budgeting, sometimes even at a basic level; for example, estimating the cost of the items in a shopping basket or balancing a checkbook.
Difficulty with multiplication-tables, and subtraction-tables, addition tables, division tables, mental arithmetic, etc.
May do fairly well in subjects such as science and geometry, which require logic rather than formulae, until a higher level requiring calculations is obtained.
Difficulty with conceptualizing time and judging the passing of time. May be chronically late.
Particularly problems with differentiating between left and right.
Difficulty navigating or mentally “turning” the map to face the current direction rather than the common North=Top usage.
Having particular difficulty mentally estimating the measurement of an object or distance (e.g., whether something is 10 or 20 feet (3 or 6 metres) away).
Often unable to grasp and remember mathematical concepts, rules, formulae, and sequences.
An inability to read a sequence of numbers, or transposing them when repeated, such as turning 56 into 65.
Difficulty keeping score during games.
Difficulty with games such as poker with more flexible rules for scoring.
Difficulty in activities requiring sequential processing, from the physical (such as dance steps) to the abstract (reading, writing and signaling things in the right order). May have trouble even with a calculator due to difficulties in the process of feeding in variables.
The condition may lead in extreme cases to a phobia or durable anxiety of mathematics and mathematic-numeric devices/coherences.
Low latent inhibition, i.e., over-sensitivity to noise, smell, light and the inability to tune out, filtering unwanted information or impressions. Might have a well-developed sense of imagination due to this (possibly as cognitive compensation to mathematical-numeric deficits).
