Brains Hard-Wired for Math

mcgrew writes "New Scientist is reporting that "non-human primates really can understand the meaning of numerals." The small study of two rhesus monkeys reveals that cells in their brains respond selectively to specific number values — regardless of whether the amount is represented by dots on a screen or an Arabic numeral. For example, a given brain cell in the monkey will respond to the number three, but not the number one. The results suggest that individual cells in human brains might also have a fine-tuned preference for specific numerical values." The report itself is online at PLoS Biology, Semantic Associations between Signs and Numerical Categories in the Prefrontal Cortex."

Re:binary

[Anpheus]

No such thing as 'base 1.'

You're thinking of Peano arithmetic. (Defined by nought, 0, and the successor function, S, and a few other axioms. You define 1 as "0S" and 2 as "0SS", etc.)

But unary is still a common name for it

[tepples]

No such thing as 'base 1.'

You're thinking of Peano arithmetic.

Unary is a common name [wikipedia.org] for the number representation of Peano arithmetic. It also shows up in data compression [wikipedia.org], where it tells how many bits a gamma-coded number [wikipedia.org] contains or the most significant bits of a Rice-coded number [wikipedia.org].

Re:binary

[Torvaun]

But 00 and 01 make up 10 values. Kind of like 0-9 being 10 values. The shirt makes perfect sense as is.

Re:binary

[Anonymous Coward]

A system of base N has available the digits 0 through N-1. So a unary system could only have the digit 1 - 1 = 0. So you couldn't have 111 in a a strict interpretation of the unary system, since the highest digit available would be 0. So you could only represent 0 with this system.