ABSTRACT
A lot of work, both with ‘normal’ individuals and with patients, supports the view that there are areas and networks in the brain that are particularly important for arithmetic. Two recent books, Stanislas Dehaene’s The number sense (Macmillan, 1997) and Brian Butterworth’s The mathematical brain (Oxford University Press, 1999), have dealt extensively with the ways in which the brain is specialized for number and arithmetic. The focus of the present chapter is the possible role that individual differences in brain functions might play in individual differences in arithmetic. There has so far been rather little direct research on this topic, at any rate as regards ‘normal’ individuals, although this is an important goal for future research.
