DailyDirt: Help For The Mathophobic
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Plenty of students in school don't like math. There's not much room to argue for points when grade school arithmetic is either wrong or right. With a better understanding of how our brains work, we might be able to devise some ways to make math more pleasant for everyone. At the very least, we can remind people to always show their work.- Some people experience physical pain when presented with difficult math problems, but it's not doing the math itself that hurts -- it's the anticipation of doing the math. Fortunately, math anxiety can be overcome with various techniques, just like other phobias. [url]
- Correlation isn't causation, folks, but a small study showed that 20 people did better at some math problems while smelling rosemary oil. These researchers should probably sniff some of their aromatherapy oils while doing the statistical analysis of this work.... [url]
- Math ability can be predicted by fMRI scans that measure the strength of communication between the left and right hemispheres in the brain. If there is a causal link, impaired math abilities could be improved with training tasks aimed at coordinating brain activity. [url]
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: arithmetic, aromatherapy, brain, fmri, math, pain
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
pain from anything you don't like...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
People great at Math
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Of course now I've pretty much forgotten all of it...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Sorry - but algebra is not considered advanced math. Algebra is part of the basic building blocks upon which more advanced mathematics is built.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]