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."

Numbers or numerals?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't it more likely that the brain responds to numbers, and is also able to learn an association between numerals and numbers?

To say that nonhuman primates respond to numerals makes it sound like they evolved to benefit from written language, which would be kinda weird, ya know.

Re:binary

[ExploHD]

and here I thought I was clever when I knew that 0 was represented by 0, 1 was represented by 1, and 2 was represented by two digits...

Re:First post

[gblfxt]

i think probing monkeys is what maths all about, seems to be populur among the human populos

Re:title wrong

[snl2587]

Good point. While brains may be wired for numbers, I highly doubt that any brain is hardwired for differential equations.

Personal Experience

[Bemopolis]

Based on my experiences teaching science classes, not ALL brains are hard-wired for math.

Re:First post

[Soporific]

What a marvelous first post referencing a first post while being understated. :)

~S

Re:music and singing

[wirelessbuzzers]

A colleague of mine once pointed out that the ability of most humans to sing (speak for yourself!), play music, and even distinguish different tunes implies an intrinsic hard-wired affinity for numbers since music depends on very specific ratios of frequencies to be gauged and produced accurately real time. You are in effect doing a Fourier transform of the music, finding the strongest peaks, and reproducing them and/or scaling them by fairly exact amounts (in spite of a broad spectrum of other frequencies present creating timbre).

The Fourier transform is done in hardware. That's just how hearing works. Specific intervals are pleasing largely because of the way their overtones line up; that's why pretty much every music system has a third, a fifth and an octave. I'd bet that producing music is done based on memory and calibration, the same way many other actions are done; no math involved.

On top of that, one is usually doing this accurately in the context of much, much lower frequencies (i.e. rhythms/tempos on the scale of Hertz rather than "tones" on the scale of 100s of Hertz) as well.

People are good at things involving periodic events on the order of a second. Not sure that math enters into it. I'd guess that the math/music connection is more about the abstract structure of music than the physical structure.

Re:binary

[JustOK]

Its true that there are two types of people:
1) those that can infer and extrapolate from incomplete data

Re:Numbers or numerals?

[cp.tar]

That they can associated numerals with numbers IS to say that they find numerals meaningful. It's to say that they're capable of that level of abstraction, when it comes to numerical values.

Oh, come on.

Unless they're proposing that Arab numerals are directly, non-symbolically related to the numerical concepts they represent, the only thing they've proved is that yay, primates are capable of learning some symbols.

If the same neurons react to quantity(3) and to symbol(3) with no previous training, then this discovery will revolutionize our schooling systems, not to mention cognitive science, semiotics and linguistics.
If, on the other hand, this included some training beforehand, then I fail to see what's the big deal.

Re:Base?

[jmorkel]

Surely if we chose our number system from the number of fingers we have, we would use base 11? Including "no fingers up" (or zero) we have 11 unique numbers, which would mean base 11.

Re:Numbers or numerals?

[mblase]

A number, for example, is the property that is common to all sets that are isomorphic in the category of sets (to spell it out: what is common to 'five apples', 'five oranges', 'five cows', ...? The number 5, of course).

True, but that's not the impressive thing. The article points out:

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.

The "numeral" aspect is significant. It's one thing to recognize the one-to-one correspondence between five dots and five apples, but quite another to identify the written digit "5" as representing five of anything.

Abstracting numbers into digits, or phonetic sounds into letters, is a complicated leap that isn't necessarily built-in to the brain. Humans do it all the time, but many cultures in the past and present do just fine without developing written language or numbers, suggesting it's not innate to the brain.

I take exception to this, though:

Nieder, meanwhile, believes that the monkeys can count to far higher numbers. "I'm convinced that they could go to infinity," he says.

Counting to nine is one thing, since each number has a unique digit. Grasping the concepts behind multi-digit base-ten numbers is one of the first steps toward real mathematics, and I imagine monkeys would need a lot more training to handle that.