Vinod Menon, a co-author and professor of child psychiatry, neurology and neuroscience at Stanford said, “Children who said they had math anxiety had greater responses in the areas of the brain implicated in processing negative emotions like fear, particularly the amygdala. We also saw reduced activity in areas normally associated with mathematical problem solving.”

Children with high math anxiety were accompanied by decreased activity in several brain regions associated with working memory and numerical reasoning. Analysis of brain connections showed that, in children with high math anxiety, the increased activity in the fear center influenced a reduced function in numerical information-processing regions of the brain.

Previous research has already found that those with a more conservative mindset tend to have over active fear centers in their brain.  This tendency to use raw emotion rather than higher cognition to process information makes doing what many  to be simple math very difficult.  

This explains why conservatives don’t get climate science as well ad the obvious repercussions of tax.policy.

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Kids with Math Anxiety Show Different Brain Functions | Z6Mag
http://z6mag.com/health/kids-with-math-anxiety-show-different-brain-functions-166853.html