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At first glance, neuropsychologist Brian Butterworth's "What Counts: How Every Brain Is Hardwired for Math" might infuriate mathphobes who insist that they just can't get a handle on numbers. Could it be true that natural selection produced brains preprogrammed with multiplication tables? Read a few pages, though, and you'll see that Professor Butterworth has more than a little sympathy for the arithmetically challenged, and indeed confesses that he too has a hard time with figures. His thesis isn't that we are born doing math, but that we are born with a faculty for learning math, much like our ability to learn language. He goes on to argue that unique individual differences in this faculty combine with our educational experiences to make us either lightning calculators or klutzes who can't figure tips.

Butterworth's style is perfect for his subject, seamlessly weaving scholarly analysis with down-to-earth humor and practical examples that will satisfy the researcher and the lay reader alike. Drawing on archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, and his own neuropsychology, he makes his case like a masterful attorney while remaining careful to leave room for scientific falsification. The history of counting is engrossing and will be new to many readers, as it has been a rather arcane field until recently - but it's just one of the many new vistas opened for the readers of "What Counts."

Rob Lightner

From Kirkus Reviews

A neuropsychologist (University College, London) argues that the ability to do math is inborn, not learned. Butterworth proposes a "number module" in the brain, containing the ability to count and to understand numbers. The evidence for this is drawn from history, animal studies, infant learning, and an impressive range of other disciplines. While few of us are professional mathematicians, numbers are an inescapable feature of everyone's life: grocery prices, phone numbers, children's ages, sports scores, speed limits, interest rates, and many other examples. The ability to use these numbers on some basic level appears to be as widespread as the ability to use language; yet the two appear not to be directly related. Number systems were developed independently in several parts of the world, and there are marked differences between them; the Babylonians used a base of 60, the Mayans one of 20, as counterexamples to the 10-based math Western cultures use. This argues against some single prehistoric genius having come up with an idea that then diffused to other cultures. In fact, the ability to distinguish between quantities and to perform primitive calculation seems inherent in infants and even in those animals and birds that have been tested. Studies of stroke patients who have lost their math ability indicates that key mathematical functions reside in the left parietal lobe of the brain. A fascinating chapter on the history of various methods of counting on fingers (or other body parts) shows a similar relationship between another specific brain region and math ability. Other chapters explore the question of why some of us are particularly good or bad at math and the ways that children learn math at home, on the streets, and in school. Butterworth writes clearly and entertainingly, with plenty of examples drawn from everyday life and flashes of humor that belie the notion that math is a dry subject. A pioneering study of a fascinating area of the human mind.

© 1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The ability to use numbers has been the key to raising us from makers of stone tools living in caves to creators of modern science living in great cities. But where does this ability come from? Is it like reading, something that depends crucially on learning a system that someone else has invented, or is it as natural as talking? In a new and provocative study, Brian Butterworth argues that our genes contain a set of instructions for building a "mathematical brain", and this is why, without benefit of teaching, human beings are born to count.

But can babies really use numbers? Can remote tribes count., even though they have no number words? Why are some people so good, and others so bad, with numbers? Is there number blindness just as there is colour blindness? Why are some, types of numbers so hard to understand? What connects our hands to our sense of number? Why does schooling leave us so muddled and discouraged that we close the door on our mathematical brain? And what can we, do to open the door again?

Brian Butterworth answers these and other intriguing questions as he takes us on a riveting biological and historical journey from tallymarks on the walls of Ice Age caves and the body-counting of New Guinea to his own cutting-edge research on mathematical brains, normal and abnormal. He tells us about the book-keeper who could no longer count above four, and about the science graduate who has to solve the simplest problems by counting on his fingers, as well as about the, calculating prodigy who can find powers and roots in seconds.

Fascinating, challenging and completely engrossing, "The Mathematical Brain" throws remarkable new light on our understanding of the extraordinary world of numbers.

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