Do you orient yourself fatally? Are you unable to mount a bookcase? Do you suffer horrors when you have to calculate the returns of a purchase? Well, according to a new study, both the ability or spatial intelligence and the ease to solve mathematical problems are directly related to the greater or lesser serenity with which you face those tasks .
At least that’s what researchers from King’s College London believe, who after analyzing the behavior of 1,400 pairs of twins between 19 and 21 years of age, have identified four forms of anxiety: general, mathematical, navigation and rotation / visualization, the latter two related to spatial intelligence .
Experts have been able to observe that around a third of the differences between anxiety levels are programmed into DNA . In the case of spatial skills, the rest would be explained by very specific environmental factors, such as driving, cycling or playing video games . This is what British scientists have detected when examining the different habits of twins.
Another finding from the King’s College team is that people who lose their temper with tasks that involve a sense of orientation or navigation do not necessarily have to be disturbed if they do, for example, a puzzle , which affects the intelligence of rotation / visualization. Or that someone who scores high on spatial anxiety can get so hot if they try to solve an arithmetic problem . They have also observed that women tend to get more nervous than men; perhaps this is influenced by the widespread stereotype that the ‘science’ disciplines (technology, engineering and mathematics) are male .
The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports , will be very useful to identify the genes that promote the different types of spatial and mathematical anxiety and to promote these cognitive abilities in children very early.
