Most students find Math as the most difficult subject in school. This belief then relates with their emotional response toward the subject, which then manifest in the action of not paying enough attention while the course is being held. When they receive their test result, they become more disappointed, which add up their aversion to Mathematics.

I personally find in my daily practice as education consultant, this amusing phenomenon most likely happens with kids of elementary school. Like one recent client that I’m still working with, a son of a Headmaster of one well-known school in Jakarta. Although the kid really study hard with his father, but in the class he is under-performed especially in Mathematics.

Is it true that Math really that difficult, or it is just merely their thought? Scientists estimate that 3 to 6 percent of the population may be unable to count objects quickly. The question is what method should be employed to learn more about the mathematical function of the brain. One logical answer that came upwas by isolating the brain’s counting region.

The challenge in identifying the precise region is that counting typically involves language, and the language areas also come online when the brain enumerates. To keep them offline during experiments, postdoctoral researcher Fulvia Castelli of the California Institute of Technology used colors. With this method, she found that the intraparietal sulcus - a long silver of tissue in the back of the brain - tabulates how “many” and not how “much”. Volunteers were shown a series of blue and green flashes of light filing rectangles on a video chessboard. When the colors appeared in isolated squares the sulcus was activated, but when the colors were strung together in a row it was not.

In daily life, this finding related in deciding quickly which checkout line at a
grocery store is shorter. Some people tote up the inviduals standing in line, while others create a mental representation of how long the queue actually is.

Unfortunately not all people can do this stunt. People with "dyscalculia" cannot develop that mental map, forcing them into slow, deliberate tallying. Castelli hopes to study way to strengthen the representational ability.