Emotional Maths

July 13th, 2007 Fred McVittie Posted in Abstract, Embodiment, Emotion, Mathematics, Metaphor |

Imagine you are standing on a tightrope, or if that is too difficult and precarious, imagine standing on a balance beam, four inches wide, three feet above the ground. You have your hands outstretched at each side and you are standing perfectly still. In this position you feel fine: poised, in control, focussed.

Now imagine someone comes along and places two books in the palm of your right hand. These books are not heavy but they do affect your posture and your ability to stand perfectly still. Now your feelings have changed and you no longer feel fine. You feel the precariousness of your position, you feel out of control and anxious. Your poise is under threat. Thankfully, at this moment someone else comes along and places another two books, first one, then another, on the palm of your left hand. Your equilibrium is restored and you feel a wave of positive emotion flowing through you as your control returns and your poise regained.

This type of experience, the fully embodied sensations associated with balance and loss of balance, may form the prototype from which more conceptual notions of balance and equilibrium are drawn. For example, the practice of mathematics, particularly in dealing with formulae and equations, involves a set of parallel operations and may be fueled by similar emotional and somatic responses.

When we are confronted by an equation of the type 1 = 1 we recognise it as ‘balanced’, and whilst we may not consciously feel the same degree of poise and control that we felt on the balance beam we can nevertheless sense the ‘rightness’ of it. We might say that this equation has inherited some of the emotional content of the physical experience it mirrors and we feel fine about it in some small way similar to how we felt as motionless acrobats. When the equation is changed to 1 = 3 however, the sense of rightness disappears and is replaced by the subtle, but nevertheless present, feelings of negativity and ‘wrongness’. Just as maintaining one’s position on the balance beam when one has an uneven distribution of weight is anxiety provoking, so this unbalanced equation conveys the same uneasiness. This felt sense of rightness and wrongness, emerging as it does from a metaphorical mapping of embodied experience onto the abstractions of mathematics, shows that maths, and indeed all abstractions, are rarely free of emotional content. Indeed it is this emotional engagement which is the difference between understanding mathematics and simply wielding symbols according to certain disembodied rules.