He makes a fair point. If you can't read it's considered a terrible thing, whereas not being able to do math at all is almost seen as normal. You can't fix something if nobody even thinks there's a problem.
Great point! This also relates to prof. Butterworth's argument that the concept of sets of objects, their numerosity and that you can assign particular numbers to them, is very abstract. In other words: most people don't notice they're using simple counting and arithmetic, while using language is much easier to recognise. In daily life simple counting is common, but anything more advanced is way less common than using language. Therefore it wouldn't surprise me that most people feel that being bad at maths isn't as bad as being bad with words, although that might not be true, as the professor stated.
@@ErikHuizinga But using words like numerosity..did he just make that yo..I don't think most people zeven learned and educated people have heard that word..
I think "extracting numerosity" is more of a sliding scale. You can see if some things are more than other things without the concept of numbers or counting.
@@DavidBeaumont The sense I got was that numerosity is the concept/experience of a certain number - when you look at five apples and think "five", you've "extracted numerosity" without having to individually count them - while counting is an algorithm to get from one numerosity to another.
@@jacobdgm Yeah, counting would be the manually 1 by 1 accumulation, whereas "extracting numerosity" would be seeing and immediatly recognizing approximately (and/or relatively) how many things there are
You dont need to count if you can tell which side is more instinctively. This is a really low level thing, a little bit of performance difference is huge on higher level.
This channel also has high quality mathematics content. It has 16,133 likes and only 205 dislikes. 98.75% of viewers, I myself included, enjoy this video. Edit: To get number of dislikes, use the Return YT Dislikes plug-in for Chrome or Firefox. Expect to see nearly 100% likes on Numberphile, cos this channel is perfection. :)
This was very informative, thank you! I'm currently applying to graduate school in Linguistics and hoping to focus on experimental, especially clinical, research. In fact, I have special interest in rhythmic processing in dyslexics and its implications, so this really got me thinking :) Edit: I'll be sure to look into Professor Butterworth's work in Dyscalculia as well; I never realized how lacking the resources are
I think that Numberphile is taking here a role that is even greater than before. It feels as if Numberphile is becoming a movement for math. Great job hitting the right nerve.
The majority of ants actually is known to walk by pheromones. The ants you may be talking about is a particular species, the Saharan desert ant, Cataglyphis fortis.
This guy is good at communicating these topics, I feel like I could just sit and be lectured by him on any subject for hours long. Amazing teacher indeed.
I imagine that neuroplasticity would allow the brain to assign the job of fiveness to a new neuron. Actually now that you mention it, the idea of one or more neurons dying, causing a person to lose some basic ability like recognizing five of something, sounds exactly like what happens to stroke victims.
I'm curious what it would be like to only lose say your twoness neuron. Would the number two then feel like 157, or some other non relatable number? You would probably then have to count three minus one or one plus one each time you think of two, instead of immediately seeing two things. Weird.
Very, very instructive. It's crazy how we can be prompt to throw out judgment on people, where in reality even big-brain brain specialist Brian happens to be clueless about fundamental psycho-physiologic traits.
Neuroscience directly contributing to the betterment of society ❤️. I believe we'll have to revise our previous beliefs about a lot of problems in people that we take for granted.
Excellent interview re: ‘discountituity’, an invisible and debilitating disorder that’s high-cost for individuals, families & economies. The ability to recognize & utilize numbers is also critical for self-sufficiency.
I remember what elementary school was like for me regarding math. It was awful. I just couldn't do it without a calculator; I couldn't add or subtract or multiply or divide in my head at all. And now today I'm in college, studying computer science, and I still can barely add or subtract or multiply or divide in my head, but I can do algebra and calculus and statistics (mind you, I still struggle in some of these; mostly in statistics but I think it's just the professor's teaching style more than anything, as I have no relation to what the data means). I have gotten better at the foundations of mathematics over the years (I've been able to successfully multiply and add in my head in recent years using various tricks like multiplying to numbers that are near what I'm trying to get, for example). Subtraction and division is still difficult for me though (honestly, subtraction is the most difficult for me). Of course I still rely on the calculator though the vast majority of the time, as I don't trust my mathematical abilities most of the time.
You don't need to extract a number for high level qualifications like visual group sizing, but numbers are absolutely necessary for the low level thought bits which are required for high level qualification. Also, counting is far more useful for audio information than it is for visual information. With visual information you can express the same object at different locations at the same time, whereas audio information presents itself over time, not space, creating the need for memory retention, and thus counting
You need to interview and go deeper on this question of the explanations for counting (not numbers because that is language), and quatities (like density, amount of space, intensity-magnitude etc...).
11:00 Also; in human brain, there are other, more complicated mechanisms that can easily overshadow it; and human brain is bigger and more complicated, anyways; which means a lot more ”neural noise”, if you will; so, it’s gonna be a lot harder to extract such mechanisms from the human brain 🤔.
Maybe to count, some of the axon output can be connected back to the neuron dendrite, maybe passing trough a secondary neuron that fires upon reaching different level... :-)
I like Thurston's hypothesis (The Number System, 1956) that all that is required is the ability to group and compare. Counting and arithmetic are then unnecessary for survival. As Thurston was of the view that arithmetic was not required, I'd be interested to know why some feel that arithmetic is inherent in some animal brains.
Unfortunately, the 2001 Ramachandran & Hubbard study may disappoint you. If synesthesia is related to neural adjacency (ie. synesthesia is due to your neuronal area being in close proximity to the neurons that recognise colour), then people are more likely to experience motion synesthesia or lexical (letter-based) synesthesia before they do numeric synesthesia.
In regards to some of the points in this video about dyslexia along with a similar condition called disgraghia, neither are officially recognized anymore in the state of Kentucky. I was diagnosed with a subset of both called dyslexic disgraphia just before they stopped being recognized. While I may be misinterpreting what I have been told, it also seems that the USA education system as a whole has stopped recognizing both types of learning disabilities and require particularly extreme forms that are expressed in an extremely long-winded manner that doesn't include the terms dyslexia or disgraphia just to be recognized that you have a learning disability. P.s. the closest thing to a reason i have been given boils down to "because computers" and "because spellcheckers" which in my case and many others from my understanding doesn't help because even spellcheckers have no clue what I'm trying to spell
I was diagnosed with dyslexia, but I have always been terrible at mental math. I have also always been terrible at quotidian calendrical and currency problems. I have a feeling they are related, or that it is possible for diagnoses to be mixed up.
An interesting question. If the brain has a small group of neurons identifying the digit 5, how would that be connected to neural circuits representing V or 101b? Or how is the circuits for the digits 1 and 5 related to the circuit for the digit F? Do we have 4 sets of calculators (or more)? Are digits identified, then summed up and input to the real calculating parts of the brain? Can we add 3 and VI and get 1001 in hardware or do we need to convert to a common system?
Numbers. They say a lot of things in nature can be explained via mathematical equations, and it is possible that the numbers, (or the mathematical equations, rather..) are indeed the programming languages of the world we live in.
@@johnmomberg5821 hmm, could be, although one can very easily look up the exchange rate! I think most people know that GBP, USD, EUR, CAD and AUD are all the same order of magnitude, so if you're being very approximate, you can just take the exchange rate between all of them as 1 (and for those who don't know, a quid is just British slang for a pound, similar to how Americans say bucks instead of dollars). I thought he was asking more because it's very easy to get lost when the media throw around figures of millions, billions, and trillions, and to have no feel for whether a number quoted without context is large or small. They all sound big, but you rarely know off the top of your head how the number compares to other costs
Society has, for some reason, normalised people being "bad at maths". I've strongly suspected I am dyscalculic ever since I first found out about it, which was probably about 20 years ago when I first got the internet at home and wanted to know why I'm so bad at maths. I had extra maths tuition in primary school, and it didn't really help me (or it did help and I was actually worse than I think I was). I've never been able to memorise the times tables, I still have to do addition on my fingers, subtraction is practically impossible for me without a calculator, and the less said about division the better. Getting an official diagnosis seems to be an impossibility in the UK without spending a ton of money going private, though.
he mentions the "portions" of the brain responsible for basic arithmetic like addition and multiplication... where/how would more advanced things like calculus "be" in this case? im not only asking "how is it stored" as a "new learned information" (like a new language or something) but the very *mathematical* "intuition" and calculations from that topic and how they are performed in a sense relating to the idea "can a person with dyscalculia do calculus" im totally expecting the answer to be "we have no idea", honestly
maybe this is not normal, but say, for hangman or pictionary games where the word is blanked into spaces, i have serious issues trying to actually count how many spaces there are in a word. (nor the length of a word in letters, but syllables is easy) pretty much anything above 6 is not intuitively countable by me i think without having to break it down to smaller sets. (7 or 8 are indistinguishable until it is determined if it can be broken into two even sets or not, which distinguish 7 from 8) however, geometric shapes (say, an N-pointed star) are much easier to tell at a glance becaues the symmetries (or lack thereof) are obvious and are broken down "for free" by the 2-dness of it, unlike a string of _s which need to be manually split and tested. but i also am absolutely atrocious at mental arithmetic, but totally fine with aljabr and geometry and other math. maybe this comes from reliance on a calculator to do the "trivial arithmetic" which is not at all interesting.
This is not so strange. Above about 4 the accuracy drops off very quickly. If you flash either 7 or 8 objects on a screen where people have to respond as quick as possible, you will see much higher reaction times and much higher error rates than for instance the difference between 4 or 5. Splitting things into groups is probably the best way to do this kind of thing. Because of numbers I'm used to grouping digits/characters/symbols per trio and count these to get to the total amount (say 13).
Do You guys think that this "likeness" of a neurons to respond more fondly to certain numbers might have something to do with Humans (in all cultures) liking *certain* numbers or giving special meaning to them ? I'm talking about things like *3* or *7* maybe *13* but of course many others as well
if there is a part of the brain that represents a certain number, like a part that represents 5ness and a part that represents 3ness. when does it stop? the brain has finite space, but numbers go on forever.. so how many numbers are represented? is that different for different species?
Thank goodness the talk of "fiveness" and "fourness" didn't get into abstraction. It's all fine and dandy to say "n-ness" but number theory's other darling letter, p, would take things in the wrong direction. Or in the right direction, given the relevance to mating calls. :P
I think it more probably a binary matching than a counting; 1 will take a, 2 will take b, ... 10 will take j -- but they have more we cannot match and we probably should flea.
seeing all the books on the shelves there makes me really wanna go smell that office. my late uncle had an office like that and it was the most wonderful place i could spend time doing nothing! ahhh book smellllllll
Yes clarifying that the frog mating itself wasn't facilitated by sound, and that only the choosing of frog mates was facilitated by sound was very thought provoking.
There's been research indicating that a single neuron in humans can be assigned to a celebrity. That's right... somewhere inside your head, there's a Brad Pitt neuron just waiting for the chance to fire!
@@drmilkweed i'm a terrible person. I thought your comment was along the lines: "Want to help on the research of dyscalculia? Then call (???????)" I'm sorry
@Mr Brightside I also had a boss with dyscalculia and he was a lab teacher and I was his assistant. It was a bit cringy to hear him saying stuff like one meter is a hundred milimeters or something like that. Although it was a bit of a bumpy road, I don't think it impacted so much on the classroom
@Yavor Kapitanov not studying is one thing, and studying or even dominate certain information and then forgetting it the moment the exam starts is a totally different one🤔
“What manner of neuron are you that can summon up counting without flint or tinder?” “I... am a counting neuron” “By what name are you known?” “There are some who call me ... TIM"
Thesis: "Making more noises to get partners doesnt apply to humans" Antithesis: "It does" Conclusion: From my own testing i can say, it does not attract mates to stand on the street and scream. It does however attract law enforcement.
In humans it’s more complex. I am sure individuals with a lambo (for instance) which has a very high price tag, will attract more partners because while frogs count burps, humans count $$$.
Professor: Since this is Numberphile, I can say that this increases monotonically. Also Professor: If one frog croaks five times, the other would croak five plus one times. We don't want to confuse the audience with such high level concepts as "six".
Having been in a primary school that didn't believe in dyslexia for 5 years and having spent 2 and a half years of secondary trying to get moved down a set in maths becuase never being to finish all the questions in time was so demoralising, I am angry and disgusted that dyscalculia isn't officially recognised. Thank you for trying to fix this nonsense.
Thanks a billion times for this video! You don't know how much this video means to me since my mind was ways enrapt by this theory I came up with that as the brain works by firing certain neurons and not firing others as a mechanism to differentiate between thought processes like a computer uses ones and zeros, that this should also apply to numbers and counting, where similar to how a computer encodes numbers in binary and represents them that way, we encode numbers with sequences of neuron firing activity. This gave me a lot of insight into this area which has always fascinated me.
