Regina Barber

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

The new year is all about blank slates, new beginnings, starting from scratch.

And so we thought, what better time than now to focus on the number that signifies origin points, literally starting from nothing, zero.

And Yasmin says that this idea of a placeholder wasn't totally unique.

The ancient Maya, for example, had a little shell symbol that they used in a similar way.

But zero didn't really become a number on its own until around the 7th century.

But in medieval Europe, not everyone was thrilled about this concept of zero.

One city, Florence, Italy, actually banned the number zero altogether.

And that abstraction actually makes it harder for our brains to process.

So today on the show, the neuroscience of the number zero.

How do humans think about the concept of nothing?

How do we find out?

And what does that mean for our brains?

You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

Okay, Yasmin, before we get into the complexity of zero, let's just start with the neuroscience of numbers in general.

You've done some writing about this, like how our brains comprehend small numbers differently than large numbers.

Can you tell us more about that?

Yeah, so these neurons are specifically for that number.

They really like that number.