Discovering The Neurological Bases Of Learning Difficulties
Knowing more about learning difficulties and how to intervene in them, both in children and adults, is the object of study of a range of professionals: educational psychologists, paediatricians, psychiatrists and psychologists. Curiously, addressing learning difficulties is also the responsibility of neurologists and biologists, since the number of studies about how such difficulties are reflected in the anatomical and functional development of the brain and its correlation at a cognitive level has increased exponentially in recent years. recent years, all thanks to neuroimaging techniques.
Therefore, it has been possible to determine not only how we acquire new cognitive skills – such as listening, speaking, writing, reasoning and mathematical skills – but also what happens in the neurobiological substrate when a person presents difficulties in their learning. Taking this into account, in this article we will develop what they are the neurological bases of learning difficulties
Over the last century, it has not been possible to reach a consensus on what learning difficulties entail. However, most professionals and research teams tend to adhere to the fact that difficulties in learning cognitive skills are intrinsic to the individual and are linked to a dysfunction of the central nervous system. It is for this reason that the study of learning at a neurological level is so important: although environmental and psychological conditions could also have an impact – such as emotional disorders or insufficient academic instructions – it has not been possible to determine that these are the cause of the difficulties. in the acquisition of cognitive skills, so the root of the issue seems to concern mainly the neurobiological dimension.
So, it seems that the alteration in the learning of certain basic psychological skills and processes is evolutionarily linked to a dysfunction of the central nervous system, and that the reason why said dysfunction occurs tends to be hereditary. For example, difficulties in speech acquisition are caused by genetic factors. It has been discovered that Children who have difficulties learning to speak tend to have parents and siblings with this same characteristic more frequently than children without difficulties.
Of course, it is also true that genetics is susceptible to environmental influences, since in recent years it has been found how much environmental factors can influence the way in which the genetic baggage that we have is expressed “of course.” factory” (that is, what is known as epigenetics). This is a new issue and susceptible to modifications or new contributions, so it is important to stay up to date as much as we can on the matter.
The neurological bases of learning difficulties
Although not all people who have learning difficulties suffer from a disorder, it has been found that both factors could be closely related. Most studies on the neurobiological bases of the disorders that people with learning difficulties may present focus on dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), although there is also research on other less common disorders. , such as non-verbal learning disorder and dyscalculia. To illustrate the neurological bases of learning difficulties, we will develop the cases of the first two disorders.
Neurological bases of dyslexia
Dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental disorder that causes problems in learning and using language, writing, and reading characterized by confusion or alteration of the order of letters, words or syllables. It is the most studied learning disorder and is also the most common.
There are different theories to explain the disorder. The one with the most support is based on the phonological deficit model, which suggests that people with dyslexia would have difficulties finding correspondences between the elements of written language and those of verbal language. In dyslexia there would be an alteration of phonological awareness which means that people who suffer from this disorder would manipulate phonemes in working memory poorly.
Working memory is one of the executive functions of the human being, it is the ability to keep information available for a short period of time to use it in carrying out a task; and its corresponding neurobiological substrate in the brain is the dorsolateral prefrontal area.
In several investigations it has been observed that there are morphological and functional differences between the brains of dyslexic patients and people without dyslexia. What is curious is that they do not seem to differ so much in the activation of the prefrontal area of the brain, but rather in the left fusiform gyrus, which affects the recognition of faces and the distinction of two or more very similar objects. When a person with dyslexia reads, the fusiform gyrus has a lower level of activation than that of a person without this disorder, which could explain the difficulties discerning letters during reading.
Neurological bases of ADHD
ADHD or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a disorder that is characterized by the persistence of symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity, at a greater or lesser level. In recent years, a theory has been postulated that maintains that the basis of ADHD could be shared with dyslexia, probably linked to the dysfunction of executive functions and attentional circuits. If so, both voluntary attention and executive functions have their neurobiological substrate in the prefrontal cortex.
As if that were not enough, the executive profiles of children and adolescents with this disorder seem to demonstrate that what is affected are the executive functions, since have lower performance in some of them such as inhibitory control —the ability to regulate or suppress one’s own responses if appropriate—, cognitive flexibility —the ability to accommodate behavior in the face of changes in the environment—or working memory.
Taking these contributions into account, we could support the idea that learning difficulties have their neurological basis in the brain areas mentioned, although the information developed can always be expanded or modified depending on the new findings that the scientific community arrives at.
