Math hurts your brain (And when it hurts, you buy) | NeuroRelay

Math can be difficult, and a recent research (published on October 31 in PLOS ONE) states that math can literally hurt your brain, as for those with with high levels of ?mathematics-anxiety?, it is associated with tension and fear. Psychology researchers state that, when anticipating an upcoming math-task, the higher one?s math anxiety, the more one increases activity in regions associated with visceral threat detection, and often the experience of pain itself (bilateral dorso-posterior insula). The interesting finding is that this relation was not seen during math performance, suggesting that it is not that math itself hurts; rather, the anticipation of math is painful. Their data suggest that pain network activation underlies the intuition that simply anticipating a dreaded event can feel painful. You can read the entire article here. (Reference: Lyons I M, Beilock S. L (2012) When Math Hurts: Math Anxiety Predicts Pain Network Activation in Anticipation of Doing Math. PLOS ONE 7(10))

So what does this have to do with marketing and advertising?
Another recent article (published in Biological Psychology in 2011) has the answer. Metacognitive theories propose that consumers track fluency feelings when buying, which may have biological underpinnings. The authors explored this using event-related potential (ERP) measures as 20 high-math anxiety and 19 low-math anxiety consumers made buying decisions for promoted (e.g., 15% discount) and non-promoted products. When evaluating prices, ERP correlates of higher perceptual and conceptual fluency were associated with buys, however only for?high-math anxiety females under no promotions. In contrast,?high-math anxiety females and low-math anxiety males results were associated with enhanced conceptual processing, to prices of buys relative to non-buys under promotions. Concurrent late positive component differences under no promotions suggest discrepant retrieval processes during price evaluations between consumer groups. When making decisions to buy or not, larger sensitive to outcome responses in the brain were associated with buying for high-math anxiety females (and smaller sensitive to outcome responses in the brain were associated with buying for low-math anxiety females) under promotions, an effect also present for males under no promotions. Thus, the study indexed decisions to buy differently between anxiety groups, but only for promoted items among females and for no promotions among males. These findings indicate that perceptual and conceptual processes interact with anxiety and gender to modulate brain responses during consumer choices. You can read the entire article here. (Reference: Jonesa W J, Childersb T L, Jiang Y (2011) The shopping brain: Math anxiety modulates brain responses to buying decisions. Biological Psychology)

What can we learn from these studies?
Studies state that the anterior insula and medial frontal cortex play important roles in shaping and determining buying behavior. Also, insular connections with frontal cortex, especially anterior cingulate and striatum, may be used to send signals about the state of the organism, which then biases how choices are made. Thus, in preference how one literally feels about a product such as thinking its price is too high is incorporated into a decision of whether to buy it. When buying is rule based, it is less clear that strong interoceptive signals should be present and that these feelings should necessarily bias behavior. Mental arithmetic is, however, widely known to induce an array of biomarkers in certain individuals such as muscle tension, increased cardiac responses, and so on. Insula may play an important role in assessing these biomarkers, and this response may be exaggerated in high-math anxiety consumers. Anterior cingulate, which receives information regarding the interoceptive state from anterior insula, may mediate the process of deploying additional attention resources as a gain-control function. Anteriorization of P3 (brain wave that is an ERP component elicited in the process of decision making) and differences there of during buying may be related to interoceptive biasing of decision-making within high-math anxiety consumers. The considerable buy versus non-buy differences that researchers found for high-math anxiety females may result as a function of these tendencies. Among low math-anxiety consumers, particularly males, interoceptive signals might be used to infer the quality of their information processes, which themselves mediate buying or not buying rather than an altered decision process.

Although this relationship needs further research in order to be clarified, the following ideas are to be remembered: the greater the math-anxiety is, the greater pain is felt in the brain; and the greater the math anxiety is, the more sensitive to buying the person is. So ?hurting? our brains with math may modulate its responses to buying decisions.

Source: http://neurorelays.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/math-hurts-your-brain-and-when-it-hurts-you-buy/

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