Bay Street in summer is a place of torture. As Toronto’s financial district, it’s home to the city’s highest concentration of business suits – which, in 35-degree weather, will induce either great pity or some serious schadenfreude. Before its days of skyscrapers and skirt suits, Bay was called Bear Street (apparently thanks to frequent bear sightings). These days, the only bears you’ll see are the ones on the Toonie.
And with the talk of money comes the talk of math. With four bank towers flanking the intersection at King and Bay, the people out here are pretty good with numbers. Whether they’re accountants, investors, or bankers, these are the people who probably weren’t terrified of math class.
It’s funny how mathematical ability seems to follow us wherever we go in life. Even now that math has nothing to do with most people’s day-jobs, our prowess with numbers becomes part of our identity. People who think they’re “bad at math” will apologize every time they pull out their phone calculators to split a restaurant bill. They’ll get stressed out every time they’re at the cashier and have to figure out exact change. We’ve got this acute awareness of being either good or abysmal with numbers – and maybe, just maybe, there’s something biological behind that.
This year, researchers at Stanford tried to tackle that question by looking at the brains of second- and third-graders – kids with so-called “math anxiety.” You may or may not be able to relate, but at least you know someone who sweats every time they’re asked to work with numbers. Apparently they’re wired a little differently.
The study enlisted a group of students to do addition and subtraction problems while they had their brains scanned by an fMRI scanner. They found that students with high math anxiety showed higher activity in the amygdala, a region that lights up to fear. What’s more, their amygdala activation was driving decreased activity in parts of the brain that deal with problem-solving and numerical reasoning. In other words, not only did these kids react to math the way they’d react to snakes or spiders: their fear was also stopping them from using their problem-solving skills to perform the math operations in the first place.
But the problem isn’t permanent. Scientists have looked at people who can overcome their math anxiety, in order to study what their brains are doing differently. Apparently, regulating your emotions and concentrating is key. In one study of math-anxious university students, participants who were able to engage parts of their frontal and parietal lobes (which are involved with attention and emotion regulation) performed almost on par with students who had no math anxiety to begin with. That comes in contrast to math-anxious students who weren’t concentrating or controlling their emotions: they did significantly worse on the problems.
There’s an important lesson to be had here. Namely, just because you’re anxious about math, doesn’t mean you’re bad at it. That said, “engaging your frontal and parietal lobes” isn’t something you can do on command either. It’s a matter of training yourself to relax and focus on the problem without letting your anxieties get in the way.
On the other end of things, scientists have been interested in the brains of mathematically gifted people. Studies of adolescent math wizards show that when they perform math problems, they’re using both the right and left hemispheres of their brains. That comes in contrast to people with average math abilities, who rely predominantly on the left hemisphere to do math (the side most associated with logic, language, and numerical reasoning). Since the right hemisphere deals with more creative problem-solving and visualization, this means the gifted kids aren’t just crunching numbers – they’re using the unusual connectedness between their right and left hemispheres to visualize math problems and solve them more quickly. In a sense, the wizards are approaching math the way most of us would approach art.
Of course, our mathematical abilities can change over time – and lot of research looks at what makes us better (or worse) at math. Apparently regular exercise increases math performance in overweight school children. The kids who exercised actually showed greater activation in their prefrontal cortex (which is linked with attention, decision-making, and complex thinking), leading to better math scores. They even went up 3.8 points on an intelligence test.
And then there are the weird cases. For example, in 2010, researchers reported that electrical brain stimulation (yes, that’s putting an electrical current to your scalp) could improve participants’ math skills for up to six months. How did it work? They’re not exactly sure. But apparently a weak electrical current around your parietal lobes can help excite the neurons below the scalp enough to make you better at number problems.
There’s a lot we still don’t understand about how our brains deal with math. And I still don’t know how the accountants and bankers on Bay Street do it (both the number part, and the wearing three layers in 30-degree weather part). Who knows, maybe they’ve been jolting their parietal lobes this whole time.
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Erene Stergiopoulos writes about brains and neighbourhoods for Toronto Standard. Follow her on Twitter @fullerenes.
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