Brian Butterworth

Brian Lewis Butterworth FBA (born 3 January 1944) is emeritus professor of cognitive neuropsychology in the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, England.

His research has ranged from speech errors and pauses, short-term memory deficits, reading and the dyslexias both in alphabetic scripts and Chinese, and mathematics and dyscalculia.

He read psychology and philosophy at Oxford University (1963-1966).

He completed an MA on Gödel's theorem at Sussex University (1967-1968) under the direction of Peter Nidditch, and a PhD in psycholinguistics at UCL supervised by Frieda Goldman-Eisler, the first professor of psycholinguistics in the UK.

His early work, following Goldman-Eisler's pioneering studies, explored the functions of pauses in speech.

He confirmed that pauses are required for both long-range planning and lexical selection.

He went on to show that gestures and glances were also coordinated with planning and with turn-taking in naturally occurring conversations, So, for example, certain gestures—'iconic' gestures— similarly both anticipate lexical selection and resist interruption.

Pauses at the ends of sentences both mark the completion of a syntactic plan, and are loci for turn-changing, therefore a speaker who wished to retain the turn would indicate this by turning away or by continuing to gesture.

This led to a novel approach to aphasia, and showed that even a fluent jargon-aphasic patient plans in the usual way, with pauses and gestures in the usual locations, and the neologisms created to fill lexical gaps.

His study of the pauses in the speech of one neurological patient with short-term memory deficit revealed entirely normal speech.

This resolved a current controversy as to whether short-term memory has an input or an output locus.

The latter hypothesis implies that speech should be affected.

In 1984 he diagnosed President Ronald Reagan on the basis of speech errors in his presidential re-election speeches in an article in the Sunday Times as having Alzheimer's disease ten years before this was formally identified.

His distinctive contribution to reading and dyslexia research was to show that John Marshall's 'two route model of reading' could explain the dyslexias in both alphabetic and logographic orthographies such as Chinese and Japanese.

According to the two-route model, the reader simultaneously processes words as a whole and the components of words—letters in alphabetic scripts, and radicals in Chinese.

Reading fluency depends on whether the outcomes of these two processes are compatible.

In English, they often are not: -INT is pronounced one way in MINT and another way in PINT.

This incompatibility slows down reading that word.

He showed that this applies also to Chinese, as he showed with his student, Yin Wengang and Japanese with colleague Taeko Wydell.

He also showed that each route could be separately impaired in development—developmental dyslexia—and in brain damage—acquired dyslexia—again in both alphabetic and logographic scripts.

To learn an alphabetic script, it is critical to learn how each letter is pronounced—this is sometimes called 'phonics'—but of course orthographies such as English there are many exceptions that just need to be learned.

For example, the letter C is pronounced differently in COT, MICE, AND CHURCH.

He showed that the phonic route could be selectively impaired or spared in both learners and neurological patients.

In development, learners who are unable to parse a whole syllable into their component phonemes will have great difficulty learning to read, and will have to rely on recognizing words as a whole, as he was the first to show.

This would not be a problem for learning to read Japanese, and he reported a young man of English-speaking parents, raised in Japan, severely dyslexic in English but a superior reader of Japanese.

His siblings were fluent readers in both languages.

Butterworth is one of the founding fathers of the modern approach to mathematical cognition.

In 1989, when he started in this area, the few people who were working on it operated in disciplinary silos.

A comprehensive review of research on number abilities in animals made no mention of humans and developmental psychologists ignored the brain.

He changed this by bringing together a range of disciplines.

The central idea is that human numerical abilities are based on an inherited mechanism specialized for extracting numerosity information from the environment.

The idea of an inherited domain-specific basis for arithmetical development is now widely accepted.

In his book The Mathematical Brain (1999) he proposed the idea of a 'number module,' an innate, domain-specific mechanism that extracts numerosity from the environment and represents it abstractly, independently of modality and mode of presentation.

This representation is used in an adaptive way, by entering into combinatorial processes isomorphic with arithmetical operations, including =, <, >, +, -, x, etc. He argued that this is the foundation of arithmetic development.

Learners for whom this mechanism is defective or inefficient, will have trouble learning arithmetic, but not necessarily other branches of mathematics.

Butterworth showed using data from neurological patients and from brain imaging that there is a specialized brain network that underpins this mechanism.

The relevant findings were brought together in Dyscalculia: From Science to Education.

That we share this mechanism with other creatures is the theme of his book ''Can Fish Count?

What Animals Reveal About Our Uniquely Mathematical Minds (2022).''

He has also pioneered educational neuroscience, notably in the study of learners with special educational needs (Educational Neuroscience, 2013).