Using fMRI brain-imaging technology for the first time with people experiencing mathematics anxiety, University of Chicago scientists have gained new insights into how some students are able to overcome their fears and succeed in math.

For the highly math-anxious, researchers found a strong link between math success and activity in a network of brain areas in the frontal and parietal lobes involved in controlling attention and regulating negative emotional reactions. This response kicked in at the very mention of having to solve a mathematics problem.

Teachers as well as students can use the information to improve performance in mathematics, said Sian Beilock, associate professor in psychology at the University of Chicago.

“Classroom practices that help students focus their attention and engage in the math task at hand may help eliminate the poor performance brought on by math anxiety,” said Beilock, a leading expert on mathematics anxiety and author of the book Choke: What The Secrets Of The Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To.

For math-anxious individuals to succeed, they need to focus on controlling their emotions, Beilock said.

The study, which the National Science Foundation funded, began by administering a questionnaire to a group of UChicago students to determine if they had math anxiety. Students answered questions about how anxious they felt when registering for a math course, walking to a challenging math class, being handed a math textbook and so on.

The study found that for the highly math-anxious students who performed well on the math task, the brain activity that started during the anticipation phase initiated a cascade of brain activity during completion of the math task itself.

This activity did not involve areas typically associated with performing numerical calculations. Rather, it was seen in subcortical structures — especially caudate and nucleus accumbens — associated with motivation and juggling risks and rewards with the demands of the task at hand.

“Essentially, overcoming math anxiety appears to be less about what you know and more about convincing yourself to just buckle down and get to it,” Beilock said. “But if you wait till the math exam has already started to deal with your anxiety, it’s already too late,” Lyons added.

For students who were not anxious about math to begin with, there was no relationship between activation in brain areas important for focusing attention, controlling emotion and math performance.

Taking a few breaths before jumping in can help one focus less on preparing to do math, and more on what actually needs to be done. “When you let your brain do its job, it usually will,” Lyons said. “If doing math makes you anxious, then your first task is to calm yourself down.”

Ref.: I. M. Lyons, S. L. Beilock, Mathematics Anxiety: Separating the Math from the Anxiety, Cerebral Cortex, 2011 [DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhr289]