Yasemin Saplakoglu

But we don't see zero birds or zero chairs.

We just know that they're absent.

But that is zero.

That's, you know, an extra level of abstraction from the other thing.

kinds of numbers that we see around us all the time.

Right, so this is actually kind of cool.

We have what are called number neurons in the brain.

So there are neurons that are tuned to specific numbers.

There are neurons that favor, for example, the number five, and there are other neurons that favor the number seven.

And so on.

So that means that for the neurons that favor the number five, they'll fire more.

Like if it sees five items on a table, it'll fire more than if it sees four or six.

It'll still fire for four and six, but less and then even less for three and seven.

Yeah, it's kind of neat that we have all of these.

And there's a lot of questions surrounding it still.

We don't know if there are neurons that fire for 1,505.

That seems like there would be a lot of neurons in the brain then for the various numbers.

I'm sure there's some other kind of mechanism there.

And yeah, there was this research recently that found that the brain actually analyzes small numbers different than it does larger numbers.

So there's a weird boundary around the number four.