Think you’re bad at math? You may suffer from ‘math trauma’
Even some teachers suffer from anxiety about math.
I teach people how to teach math, and I've been working in this field for 30 years. Across those decades, I've met many people who suffer from varying degrees of math trauma – a form of debilitating mental shutdown when it comes to doing mathematics.
Brain study finds circuits that may help you keep your cool
Research by neuroscientists at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory helps explain how the brain regulates arousal.
The big day has come: You are taking your road test to get your driver's license. As you start your mom's car with a stern-faced evaluator in the passenger seat, you know you'll need to be alert but not so excited that you make mistakes. Even if you are simultaneously sleep-deprived and full of nervous energy, you need your brain to moderate your level of arousal so that you do your best.
- Working with your hands affects brain chemistry in a positive way.
- Automation technologies can strip away a sense of agency and meaning in our lives.
- Using your hands connects you with your environment in a way that most technologies cannot.
An ant colony has memories that its individual members don’t have
Just like your brain.
Like a brain, an ant colony operates without central control. Each is a set of interacting individuals, either neurons or ants, using simple chemical interactions that in the aggregate generate their behaviour. People use their brains to remember. Can ant colonies do that? This question leads to another question: what is memory?
Some perfectly healthy people can’t remember their own lives
Three study participants described their own memories as almost completely lacking a first-person perspective or involving any sense of "re-experiencing."
Psychologists in Canada think they've identified an entirely new memory syndrome in healthy people characterised by a specific inability to re-live their past. This may sound like a form of amnesia, but the three individuals currently described have no history of brain damage or illness and have experienced no known recent psychological trauma or disturbance.
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