TED: Why we choke under pressure -- and how to avoid it by Sian Leah Beilock-3

(출처: TED)

 

 

Take math as an example. That's right, I said it: math. Lots of people profess to choke or are anxious about doing math, whether it's taking a test or even calculating the tip on a dinner bill as our smart friends look on. And it's quite socially acceptable to talk about choking or performing poorly in math. You don't hear highly educated people walking around talking about the fact or bragging about the fact that they're not good readers, but you hear people all the time bragging about how they're not math people. And unfortunately, in the US, this tends to be more so among girls and women than boys and men. My research team and I have tried to understand where this fear of math comes from, and we've actually peered inside the brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging, of people who are worried about math. We've shown that math phobia correlates with a concrete visceral sensation such as pain, of which we have every right to feel anxious. In fact, when people who are worried about math are just getting ready to take a math test -- they're not even taking it, they're just getting ready -- areas of the brain known the be involved in our neural pain response are active. When we say math is painful, there's some truth to it for some people.

 

▶visceral 
1. [형용사][문예체] (깊은 사고가 아니라) 강한 감정에 따른, 본능적인
2. [형용사][전문 용어] 내장(內臟)의

 

 

 

 

 

But where does this math anxiety come from? It turns out that math anxiety is contagious. When adults are worried about math, the children around them start worrying, too. As young as first grade, when kids are in classrooms with teachers who are anxious about their own math ability, these kids learn less across the school year. And it turns out that this is more prevalent in girls than boys. At this young age, kids tend to mimic same-sex adults, and at least in the US, over 90 percent of our elementary school teachers are women.

 

▶prevalent [ˈprevələnt]
[형용사] (특정 시기·장소에) 일반적인[널리 퍼져 있는] (=common, widespread)

 

 

 

Of course, it's not just what happens in the classroom. Social media plays a big role here, too. It wasn't so long ago that you could purchase a Teen Talk Barbie that when the cord was pulled, it would say things like, "Will we ever have enough clothes?" and "Math class is tough." And just a few years ago, major retailers were marketing T-shirts at our young girls that read things like, "I'm too pretty to do math," or, "I'm too pretty to do my homework so my brother does it for me." And let's not forget about the parents. Oh, the parents. It turns out that when parents are worried about their own math ability and they help their kids a lot with math homework, their kids learn less math across the school year. As one parent put it, "I judge my first grader's math homework by whether it's a one-glass assignment or a three-glass night."

 

When adults are anxious about their own math ability, it rubs off on their kids and it affects whether they choke or thrive. But just as we can put limits on others, we can take them off. My research team and I have shown that when we help parents do fun math activities with their kids - rather than, say, just doing bedtime stories or bedtime reading, they do bedtime math, which are fun story problems to do with your kids at night, not only do children's attitudes about math improve, but their math performance across the school year improves as well. Our environment matters. From the classroom to parents to media, and it can really make a difference in terms of whether we choke or thrive.


Fast-forward from my high school soccer game to my freshman year in college. I was in the chemistry sequence for science majors, and boy did I not belong. Even though I studied for my first midterm exam -- I thought I was ready to go -- I bombed it. I literally got the worst grade in a class of 400 students. I was convinced I wasn't going to be a science major, that maybe I was dropping out of college altogether. But then I changed how I studied. Instead of studying alone, I started studying with a group of friends who at the end of the study session would close their book and compete for the right answer. We learned to practice under stress. If you could've looked inside my brain during that first midterm exam, you likely would've seen a neural pain response a lot like the math-anxious individuals I study. It was probably there during the stressful study situation as well. But when I walked into the final, my mind was quiet, and I actually got one of the highest grades in the entire class. It wasn't just about learning the material; it was about learning how to overcome my limits when it mattered most.


What happens in our heads really matters, and knowing this, we can learn how to prepare ourselves and others for success, not just on the playing field but in the boardroom and in the classroom as well.


Thank you.