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Inside Carol Vorderman's
head
(Filed: 03/09/2003)
The television star helps to solve the riddle of
whether mathematicians are born or made. Roger Highfield
reports
How could I pass up the chance to witness the most
revealing pictures ever taken of Carol Vorderman ? The star of
Channel 4's Countdown has always had a love of numbers and has been
an enthusiastic backer of high-profile efforts to boost numeracy,
from workbooks for parents and children to meetings to lobby the
Prime Minister. Now I was to join a select group of neuroscientists
who want to lay bare her mind, to riffle through the neurons of one
of the few tele-vision stars more famous for her brains than her
face. With luck, we would discover why she has a head for
figures.
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Are mathematicians born or made? Carol Vorderman lends
a head |
For a lecture series run by The Telegraph and the
healthcare company Novartis, and funded by the National Endowment
for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) , Vorderman - a former
Nesta trustee - had agreed to allow Dr Mark Lythgoe and his
colleagues at University College London to reveal the inner workings
of her brain.
And the reward for Britain's highest-paid female
television presenter? A mug that invites others to have their brains
scanned at UCL, a bouquet and an opportunity to help publicise the
Visions of Science Photographic Awards, which provide stunning
images to accompany Dr Lythgoe's forthcoming lectures on whether
mathematicians are born or made.
Vorderman first showed an interest in numbers when
she was three, during her impoverished upbringing in Wales. Her
talents were recognised by her "superb" maths teacher, Mr Parry, who
wrote that "she has a mastery of computation which should prove
profitable".
She was the first woman to appear on Channel 4 when
it launched, and has been there ever since, performing mental
arithmetic as her party trick. Though she protests that she is no
maths prodigy, she is dubbed "telly brainbox" by the tabloids and
has such a high success rate that when she does fluff her maths (for
instance, how to calculate 959 using 75,2,9,1,10 and 4) she makes
headlines.
Because the Countdown format has remained the same
for two decades, she gets letters from stroke victims and patients
who measure their recovery by their ability to solve the programme's
puzzles over the course of their rehabilitation. By the same means,
she has found that age and childbirth have slowed down her own maths
speed.
To find out more about her brain, she became the
first celebrity client of UCL's Institute of Cognitive Neuro-science
last week for a series of scans under the guidance of Prof Brian
Butterworth and Dr Lythgoe.
In the basement of the Wellcome Department of Imaging
Neuroscience , Vorderman was trundled into the magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI) scanner, understandably anxious about what the
scientists might find. A powerful magnetic field (30,000 times that
of the Earth's magnetic field) was generated by the scanner, lining
up the spins of atomic nuclei in her brain. The striking contrast in
the final image was obtained by detecting radio signals emitted by
spinning nuclei.
The first "functional" MRI experiment, undertaken by
Dr Fulvia Castelli, looked at brain activity by detecting tiny
changes in blood oxygenation in her parietal sulcu s when she was
asked to think of the number and quantity of something, say the
number of cubes of sugar versus how much sugar there is.
So as not to clutter the scan with activity in her
language areas (the left half of her brain), Vorderman was not
presented with numbers but collections of red and green rectangles
and asked to judge their overall number and length. A second task
saw her attempting to judge whether two arrangements of rectangles
of different shades were the same, an idealised version of placing a
series of numbers in sequence. "Of all the tests, I found this the
most difficult," she said. "The images were on the screen for such a
short time it was impossible to analyse them.''
"Carol had probably never encountered this test,
which is designed to bypass all learning and education to show a
core cognitive system, one we possibly share with animals," said Dr
Castelli.
The second experiment, organised by Joey Tang,
examined another basic skill - interpreting numerals. Vorderman
smiled with relief because the experiment used numbers again, not
patterns.
She was presented with a quick succession of number
pairs and then asked to say which was numerically the biggest. The
problem was that the physical size of the numerals also varied, so
that a big 2 could be shown with a small 9. This "stroop" experiment
creates conflict in the mind. Because of the time pressure,
Vorderman cursed when she was tricked into saying seven was higher
than eight. "I knew that I had pressed the wrong button, but it was
too late," she said. Yet, Ms Tang was impressed by her
performance.
The neuroscientists wanted to explore whether
Vorderman uses the same trick to boost her mathematical dexterity as
a well known prodigious calculator, Rüdiger Gamm , who has been
shown to use long-term memory to boost his skills. Dr Lythgoe said
that there was anecdotal evidence that she may do the same, since
she normally does an hour of calculations before each Countdown and
this warm-up may help her draw on different brain regions.
A final experiment was conducted by Dr Chloe Hutton,
winner of a Wellcome Trust biomedical image award. Using a novel
processing technique, Dr Hutton could measure the thickness of
Voderman's grey matter, a large folded sheet mainly consisting of
nerve cells surrounding the white matter that contains the pathways
between the cells.
Though still being tested, this method is potentially
revolutionary since it could show how grey matter is being beefed up
in regions of the brain that are in constant use. Her method could
also back other studies that suggest that, though women's brains
are, on average, smaller, they may pack more nerve cells into the
prefrontal lobes, which regulate language, judgment and future
actions.
It was hard to know what Vorderman would make of Dr
Hutton's final 3D rendering of her head, shorn of hair, with its top
flipped open. Using smart software, her brain could also be inflated
- removing its wrinkles - to show the full extent of activity that
would normally be concealed deep within the convoluted surface, or
cortex.
As the scanner buzzed on and off, reflecting on how
the magnetic field was being tweaked to acquire a series of
1mm-thick brain slices, it highlighted the density and environment
of protons in Voderman's brain, the tell-tale clue to whether it was
looking at white matter or grey. After two hours, the scanner almost
lulled Vorderman to sleep. When she stirred, she joined us in the
control room to spend time moving a cursor over a computer display,
slicing her brain in various ways, checking to see if there was any
difference on the side where she uses her mobile phone (there
wasn't).
"This is fascinating," was her reaction to the first
voyage through her cerebellum. "For the first time, I can literally
go in one ear and out the other."
For an average person, the thin rind of the cortex,
the home of consciousness, is 2 sq ft to 2.5 sq ft. In the case of
Vorderman, initial results suggest her brain surface is 2.1 sq
ft.
When I pointed out the huge size of her tongue
(actually quite normally proportioned), I was subject to a quick
slap and smart riposte about all the practice it gets. There was
similar banter when Dr Lythgoe, after inspecting a slice through her
face, teased her about having a nose job.
Vorderman was, however, reassured to be told there
were no signs of tumours or strokes. Prof Butterworth marvelled at
the size of her hippocampus , a region involved in memory and
navigation. And Dr Hugo Critchley, a UCL researcher who has had his
own brain immortalised as a plastic model, praised her "healthy
brain with no gaps". Like other scans, the anonymised details of her
brain will be passed to a database for further study.
Voderman's scans will also star in a forthcoming
lecture series, an extension of the Visions of Science Photographic
Awards, backed by The Telegraph, Novartis and Nesta. Drummond Paris,
CEO of Novartis Pharmaceuticals UK Ltd, said: "Some of us look at
numbers and see patterns, but for others they make no sense at all.
Dr Lythgoe's lecture will give us a fascinating insight into why
this might be, through images, psychology and neuroscience.''
 The first talk
takes place in the Science Museum, London, at 7pm on Oct 23 and,
next year, at the At-Bristol Museum , Bristol, on Jan 29 and Glasgow
Science Centre on March 18. The tickets, £5, can be booked via
Ticketselect. Call 0870 890 5501 or visit http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/exit.jhtml?exit=http://www.wayahead.com/.
Accompanying the
series will be the Visions of Science photographic exhibition, which
begins a nationwide tour at the Science Museum, London, from Oct 13
until Nov 29.
For publishers wishing to reproduce photographs on
this page please phone 44 (0) 207 538 7505 or email syndicat@telegraph.co.uk
Next story: Connected
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