Is math literally painful for students with high math anxiety?

​Last week, Dr. Nolting stumbled upon a fascinating article at PLOS One about the physical effects of math anxiety. He and the rest of us at Academic Success Press found it incredibly groundbreaking. In it, two cognitive scientists, Ian M. Lyons and Sian L. Beilock show that math anxiety triggers “activity in regions associated with visceral threat detection.” This causes students who suffer from high math anxiety to feel something close to “the experience of pain itself” when anticipating “math-related situations.”

Given the pedigree of the academics involved—Beilock is now the president of Columbia University’s Barnard College—the article carries a lot of weight. Its authors asked students to complete a word task and a math task while measuring neural activity using fMRI. During these tests, students with math anxiety showed upticks in activity in regions of the brain associated with pain perception.

Lyons and Beilock ultimately concluded that these results may “provide a potential neural mechanism to explain why [students with high math anxiety] tend to avoid math and math-related situations, which in turn can bias [them] away from taking math classes or even entire math-related career paths.”

Fascinating, fascinating stuff.

For more, the entire article is available at:
Lyons IM, Beilock SL (2012) When Math Hurts: Math Anxiety Predicts Pain Network Activation in Anticipation of Doing Math. PLoS ONE 7(10): e48076. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0048076

Also, if you would like to know more about how physical environments affect human behavior, check out one of Sian Beilock's books (listed below). Both are well-received and serve as good introductions to the indelible link between the human body and mind. 

How the Body Knows Its Mind: The Surprising Power of the Physical Environment to Influence How You Think and Feel

Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To