Neuroscientist Sian Beilock has studied the brain when people are working under pressure. A particular area of the brain called the “working memory” is needed when we do calculations. The working memory is sometimes referred to as the “search engine of the mind” and, like all areas of our brains, is developed through practice. What Beilock has shown is that when we are stressed or under pressure, our working memory is impeded. The students who are the most compromised are those with the most working memory. This means that when students are given timed math tests and they become anxious, as many do, their working memory is compromised, and they cannot calculate the answers. Anxiety sets in, and a pattern of harmful beliefs soon follows.
The feeling of stress impeding your brain may be something you have known yourself. Have you ever had to work on a math calculation under pressure and felt as though your mind “went blank”? That is the feeling of stress blocking your working memory. When we give timed tests to young children, many of them experience stress, their working memory is compromised, and they cannot recall math facts. When they realize they cannot achieve, anxiety sets in.
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The irony of the unfortunate speed-based math activities in schools, where children are turned away from a lifetime of mathematical and scientific thinking because they don’t produce math facts quickly and under pressure, is that mathematics is not a subject that requires speed. Some of the strongest mathematical thinkers are very slow with numbers and other aspects of mathematics. They do not think quickly; they think slowly and deeply.
In recent years, some of the world’s greatest mathematicians, including those who have won the Fields Medal, such as Laurent Schwartz and Maryam Mirzakhani, have talked openly about how slow they are with math. After Schwartz won the Fields Medal, he wrote an autobiography about his school days in which he talked about feeling stupid in school because he was one of the slowest thinkers. He says:
I was always deeply uncertain about my own intellectual capacity; I thought I was unintelligent. And it is true that I was, and still am, rather slow. I need time to seize things because I always need to understand them fully. Toward the end of the eleventh grade, I secretly thought of myself as stupid. I worried about this for a long time.
I’m still just as slow. . . . At the end of the eleventh grade, I took the measure of the situation and came to the conclusion that rapidity doesn’t have a precise relation to intelligence. What is important is to deeply understand things and their relations to each other. This is where intelligence lies. The fact of being quick or slow isn’t really relevant.
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At the time I was speeding through my math questions, I was myself working under the myth that speed is what is important. In our archaic school system, it is not surprising that millions of students believe speedy performance is what is valued. Now many years on, I have learned to approach content differently. I no longer look at math problems as something to answer quickly, but as something to think about deeply and creatively. That change has helped me greatly. I now get more from not only mathematical thinking, but any scientific or technical reading or work. The change in my approach has helped me so much and has fueled my passion to help others disarm this pervasive myth in the pursuit of understanding, creativity, and connections.
Medical doctor Norman Doidge says that when people learn something quickly, they are probably strengthening existing neural connections. These he describes as “easy come, easy go” neural connections, which can be rapidly reversed. This is what is happening when we study for a test, and we go over something we have already learned. We cram information in and reproduce it in a day or so, but it does not last and is quickly forgotten. More permanent brain changes come from the formation of new structures in the brain—the sprouting of neural connections and synapses. This is always a slow process.
