Discovering the neurological bases of Learning Difficulties

Learn 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 on how such difficulties are reflect in the anatomical and functional development of the brain and in its correlation at a cognitive level has increased exponentially in recent years, all thanks to the techniques of neuroimaging.

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.

• Related article: "Neuropsychology: what is it and what is its object of study?"

What effects do learning difficulties generate?

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 the difficulties of learning Cognitive abilities have an intrinsic character to the individual and are linked to a dysfunction of the nervous system central. It is for this reason that the study of learning at a neurological level is so important: although the conditions could also influence environmental and psychological disorders - such as emotional disorders or insufficient academic instructions - it has not been possible to determine that these are causes of the difficulties in the acquisition of cognitive skills, so the root of the issue seems to concern mainly the dimension neurobiological.

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 they can environmental factors influence the way in which the genetic baggage that we have “from the factory” is expressed (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.

• You may be interested: "Learning disorders: types, symptoms, causes and treatments"

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 about the neurobiological bases of the disorders that people with learning difficulties may present focus on the dyslexia and the Attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity (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 greatest support is based on the phonological deficit model, which suggests that people with dyslexia would have difficulty finding correspondences between the elements of written language and those of the verbal. 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 maintain information available for a short period of time for use in accomplishing 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 fusiform gyrus left, 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 dysfunction of executive functions and circuits attentional. 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—, flexibility cognitive—the ability to accommodate behavior in the face of changes in the environment—or memory of job.

Taking these contributions into account, we could support the idea that learning difficulties have their neurological basis in brain areas. stated, although the information developed can always be expanded or modified based on new findings to which the scientific community arrive

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