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Some People Experience Math Like Bodily Pain

If math tests make you sweat, you may be suffering from math anxiety. While some dismiss those feelings as mere butterflies, there’s more to the equation. A fascinating Discover Magazine article notes that brain scans “show that people like you suffer from more than just nerves. In people who are highly anxious about math, the threat of doing arithmetic activates the same brain areas as a punch in the stomach.”

Researchers at the University of Chicago’s Human Performance Lab are curious about how human beings think and how we perform under pressure. Since anxiety heightens our body awareness and makes us more sensitive to pain, researchers Ian Lyons and Sian Bielock decided to study whether anxiety creates a direct connection to the brain’s pain centers.

They asked people with high and low math anxiety to solve problems––some mathematical, some linguistic––while in an fMRI scanner. What they discovered is that in those with high math anxiety, “math problems lit up brain regions involved in sensing pain. Specifically, pain in the gut.” The parts of the brain that became active are those that “are active during the experience of visceral pain—for example, a stomachache or a gut punch,” says Ian Lyons. “These areas are also involved in detection of threat to the body.” Although math-anxious test takers may not be feeling physiological pain, their brains view each new problem as a physical threat.

So what can be done?

What surprised the researchers most is that the “kick-in-the-gut reaction…happened not when subjects were actually facing those dreaded arithmetic problems, but a few seconds before.” When people with high math anxiety saw a math problem coming rather than a word puzzle, the pain centers in their brains lit up. But once they actually began working on the problem, that pain response subsided. In other words, it was the anticipation, not the problem itself, that caused the pain.

“This underscores the fact that anxiety is very much about the psychological interpretation of an event or phenomenon, and not so much about the event itself,” Lyons explains. He and Bielock suspect that once people begin solving a problem it takes all their mental energy, leaving no mental resources left to be anxious.

So the next time you take a math test––no matter how much you dread them––perhaps the antidote to anxiety is to dive right in.

 

Preston, Elizabeth. “Math-Phobes Experience Arithmetic Like Bodily Pain.” Discover Magazine, 2 Nov 2012, https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/math-phobes-experience-arithmetic-like-bodily-pain.

Photo by Antoine Dautry on Unsplash