The Wonderful Maths: Will Improves our Emotional Health?

According to researchers, engaging the prefrontal cortex with mental math exercises could help to improve emotional health.

Engaging a specific part of the brain during mental math exercises is connected with better emotional health, according to a new brain-scanning study published by Duke researchers in the journal Clinical Psychological Science.

The research takes a preliminary step toward informing new brain training strategies to stave off depression and anxiety. Although the relationship between math and emotion needs further study, the new findings may also lead to new tests gauging the effectiveness of psychological therapies.

“Our work provides the first direct evidence that the ability to regulate emotions like fear and anger reflects the brain’s ability to make numerical calculations in real time,” said Matthew Scult, a neuroscience graduate student in the lab of the study’s senior investigator Ahmad Hariri, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke.



An overlay of an MRI shows the parts of the brain that are engaged in doing cold calculations and dealing with hot emotions. New research from Duke shows that mental math in this part of the brain may aid emotional health. NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to Annchen R. Knodt.

Although they may seem unrelated, doing “cold” calculations and regulating “hot” emotions both rely on similar mental gymnastics: the ability to manipulate and update information. Researchers have long speculated about the link between the two. In the new study, Hariri’s group analyzed brain activity of 186 undergraduates — using a type of non-invasive brain scan called functional magnetic resonance imaging — while they were doing math problems from memory.



The students are participants in the ongoing Duke Neurogenetics Study, which is exploring relationships between genes, the brain and mental health. In addition to the scans, participants completed questionnaires and interviews assessing their mental health status and emotional coping strategies.

Memory-based math problems stimulate a region of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which has already been linked to depression and anxiety. Studies have found, for example, that higher activity in this area is associated with fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression. A well-established psychological treatment called cognitive behavioral therapy, which teaches individuals how to re-think negative situations, has also been seen to boost activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. In the current study, the more active a person’s dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was while performing mental math, the more likely he or she was to report being able to adapt their thoughts about emotionally difficult situations.

“We don’t know for sure why that is, but it fit into our hypothesis that the ability to do these more complex math problems might allow you to more readily learn how to think about complex emotional situations in different ways,” Scult said. “It is easy to get stuck in one way of thinking.” Greater activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex also was associated with fewer depression and anxiety symptoms. The difference was especially obvious in people who had been through recent life stressors, such as failing a class.



Participants with higher dorsolateral prefrontal activity were also less likely to have a mental illness diagnosis. It is still unclear whether more actively engaging the brain area with math exercises would lead to better emotional coping strategies or the other way around. The researchers plan to collect the same type of data over a longer time period, to see whether one observation precedes the other. “We hope, with these and future studies, that we can inform new strategies to help people regulate their emotions, and to prevent symptoms of anxiety and depression from developing in the first place,” Scult said.

Source: Karl Bates – Duke Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to Annchen R. Knodt. Original Research: Abstract for “Thinking and Feeling: Individual Differences in Habitual Emotion Regulation and Stress-Related Mood Are Associated With Prefrontal Executive Control” by Matthew A. Scult, Annchen R. Knodt, Johnna R. Swartz, Bartholomew D. Brigidi
and Ahmad R. Hariri in Clinical Psychological Science. Published online October 6 2016 doi:10.1177/2167702616654688. Neurosciencenews

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Do Numbers Actually Exist?

By: Alexandria Addesso

From a very young age children are introduced to the language of math. Mathematics transcends every language barrier and is internationally known and used to quantify everything on Earth and beyond. Students are indoctrinated into the advance language of mathematics as though their own existence depended on it.

But do numbers actually exist? It’s a question that could shake some to their core, yet a simple “no” should not seem erroneous to those who employ logic. Numbers are used to keep record of tangible things that do exist. Do you remember how much math teachers stressed the importance of recording the units with the answer to the problems you worked on?



But are numbers a part of nature since they can be employed to keep track of everything in nature or are they a human creation? Are they simply an idea that stuck? A school of thought loosely related to the Greek philosopher Plato, known as Platonism, argues that yes they do exist. This school of thought identifies numbers as abstract objects. Abstract objects differ from tangible objects because they cannot be perceived in the physical world, they are outside of time and space. Much like an idea or concept before coming into fruition. But if something cannot be perceived how can it exist? Do we need to have faith in numbers for them to exist?

The nominalist school of thought claims that numbers exist only to the degree that they are used to describe things that actually do exist. Everything must have a unit.
“Our mathematical claims should best be understood as claims about objects in the world; so tables, chairs, pencils that sort of thing,” said Dr. Jonathan Tallant, an expert in the field of the Philosophy of Mathematics, while explaining the nominalist view.

The school of mathematical fictionalism believes numbers do not exist. Fictionalism do not believe in mathematical systems in general. They claim that the language of mathematics is merely a useful fiction, since numbers do not tangibly exist solely in and of themselves, they cannot be true.



Three different perspectives, and none of which can certainly be verified. Is the glass half empty? or half full? Turn it upside down.

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