Mr. Scott
Under the Amazing One's Wing
- Joined
- Nov 23, 2005
- Messages
- 2,546
This is from the March 3, 2008 issue of “The New Yorker” magazine pp 42—47 article "Numbers Guy."
What evolution predicts is that systems arose spontaneously and randomly in ways that no intelligent designer would proceed. Examples in the human brain abound, but this awesome one came to my attention today in this article.
It seems that we have two systems in our brains that count things. One instantaneously and instinctively counts and compares numbers from one to three. Brain scans have located the region that does this "deep within a fold in the parietal lobe called the intraparietal sulcus, where the neurons involved are intermingled with wiring for other mental functions."
Another region is responsible for higher math, like counting four or more objects, and works very differently (learned rather than instinctive function) and works more slowly, even in people with high levels of mathematical training and skill.
Here’s where it gets cool:
Stanislas Dehaene, a French scientists studying this, found that “subjects performed better with large numbers if they held the response key in their right hand but did better with small numbers with the response key in their left hand."
Then it gets cooler still:
When their hands were crossed, “the effect reversed. The actual hand used to make the response was irrelevant; it was the space itself that the subjects unconsciously associated with larger or smaller numbers. Dehaene hypothesizes that the neural circuitry for number and the circuitry for location overlap. He even suspects that this may be why travelers get disoriented entering Terminal 2 of Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport, where small-numbered gates are on the left.”
Now, this would seem to me to be a very unintelligent way to design a brain. However, if the brain evolved the way we think it did, it’s exactly the kind of thing we would expect to see.
What evolution predicts is that systems arose spontaneously and randomly in ways that no intelligent designer would proceed. Examples in the human brain abound, but this awesome one came to my attention today in this article.
It seems that we have two systems in our brains that count things. One instantaneously and instinctively counts and compares numbers from one to three. Brain scans have located the region that does this "deep within a fold in the parietal lobe called the intraparietal sulcus, where the neurons involved are intermingled with wiring for other mental functions."
Another region is responsible for higher math, like counting four or more objects, and works very differently (learned rather than instinctive function) and works more slowly, even in people with high levels of mathematical training and skill.
Here’s where it gets cool:
Stanislas Dehaene, a French scientists studying this, found that “subjects performed better with large numbers if they held the response key in their right hand but did better with small numbers with the response key in their left hand."
Then it gets cooler still:
When their hands were crossed, “the effect reversed. The actual hand used to make the response was irrelevant; it was the space itself that the subjects unconsciously associated with larger or smaller numbers. Dehaene hypothesizes that the neural circuitry for number and the circuitry for location overlap. He even suspects that this may be why travelers get disoriented entering Terminal 2 of Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport, where small-numbered gates are on the left.”
Now, this would seem to me to be a very unintelligent way to design a brain. However, if the brain evolved the way we think it did, it’s exactly the kind of thing we would expect to see.
