ABSTRACT
It is not easy for a numerate person to understand the everyday consequences of acquired calculation and number deficits. However, we need numbers in many daily activities: to have a sense of time, to locate a house, to change money, to understand the score of a match, to read a price, to estimate a distance, to make a telephone call, and so on. Not only do we have to understand numbers, but we also have to be able to manipulate them for cooking, driving a car, changing money, selling, buying, checking our bank account, arriving in time for an appointment, and so on. Although the domain of number is crucial in everyday situations, it has been neglected for a very long time in neuropsychology, and it is only over the last 20 years that the neuro-psychological approaches to numbers and calculation have made any major progress. Although debate still rages over the cognitive architecture of our numerical abilities, a great deal of research has delineated the main questions that remain to be solved.
