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]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: arithmetic, aromatherapy, brain, fmri, math, pain