Some people get jittery when faced with simple maths problems. And they may rely more heavily on certain brain circuits than do people who do not experience such math anxiety. That's the finding of a new study. Using a different mental approach might help explain why people with math anxiety struggle more with complex problems.
To figure out what was going on, researchers placed adults in a brain-scanning device. Called a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, it measures blood flow in the brain. This lets researchers see which brain regions are active at a particular point in time. For the new study, the study recruited people with and without math anxiety. All of the adults were asked to answer whether simple math problems — such as 9+2=11— were correct or not. Both groups had similar response times. Each group also was equally accurate. The brain scans, however, turned up some differences.
In people who weren’t anxious about math, there was less activity in one brain region. It is called the frontoparietal (FRUN-tow-pah-RY-eh-tul) attention network. It is involved in working memory and the solving of problems. Less activity here was linked to performing better. But not in math-anxious people. Those adults showed no link between performance and the level of activity in this network.
