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But what, exactly, is a number? A group of Chinese researchers tackled this deep philosophical question from a neurological perspective in a study reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They sought to verify the invariant nature of numerosity perception in an experiment that included fMRI scanning to establish the brain structures activated in number sense.
Proceeding from the obvious assumption that numerosity is invariant to specific features like size, orientation, shape and color, they designed a test that included a number of dots within an enclosed space. To test the invariant effect of connection, they used arbitrary and irregular line segments connecting dots; there were three conditions: zero, one, and two connected pairs of dots were included in the test patterns. Subjects were shown these patterns adjacent to reference patterns that contained 12 dots unconnected by line segments. They were asked to indicate solely through visual perception which pattern contained more dots.
The researchers found that connecting dots in the patterns led to a robust result of underestimation. The researchers tested another topological invariant, the inside/outside relationship, by enclosing pairs of dots within ovals and irregular oval-like shapes. Interestingly, the results demonstrated that underestimation also occurred in this condition, and that it depended directly on the number of enclosed dot pairs in the pattern.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 12 2015, @12:11PM
I arrived at similar conclusions.
The whole thing does make me wonder how brains work with numbers, though. As a kid, I progressed rapidly, ahead of my peers. As a high schooler and in college, I found that I ran into brick walls when I tried to advance in math. Some of that shit is just over my head, and I never found a way to make sense of them.
My youngest kid, however, has no problem with those brick walls. He's doing stuff way over my head. When I attempt to understand what he's doing, the talk quickly takes off through one of those brick walls, like he has a magic door through the wall, and I just can't find the door knob/handle.
I guess he has a couple wrinkles in his gray matter that I don't - or I have the wrinkles, and he doesn't. Or the wrinkles just connect in a different fashion. From where I stand, it looks like he has the potential to do original work with math. That would be pretty cool - "My kid developed blah blah blah." To which most people would respond, "WTF you talking about?"
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 12 2015, @06:24PM
it may just be that you were not motivated enough at the right time. a lot of smart people become lazy and assume that actually doing homework is useless, and then when things get a little more complicated, they fail to keep up.
in any case, congratulations on the smart kid. mine has a few years left before I expect him to read or write, so I can't tell whether he'll be as lazy as I was.