Math anxiety

All through school I struggled with math. The more complex calculations the more I struggled. I would have failed math my last term at uni if I hadn’t promised my professor that I would never apply to job where math and difficult calculations were need. A promise that I kept over the years and even now 15 years later I cringe when I think about math. Now researchers say that math actually saps working memory.

Math anxiety -- feelings of dread and fear and avoiding math -- can sap the brain's limited amount of working capacity, a resource needed to compute difficult math problems, said Mark Ashcraft, a psychologist at the University of Nevada Las Vegas who studies the problem.

"It turns out that math anxiety occupies a person's working memory," said Ashcraft, who spoke on a panel at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco.

Ashcraft said while easy math tasks such as addition require only a small fraction of a person's working memory, harder computations require much more. Worrying about math takes up a large chunk of a person's working memory stores as well.

Hm, so really then I could have been better at math if I hadn’t been afraid of math. Interesting thought… I wonder what my old math professor would say?