Yasemin Saplakoglu

There seems to be some sort of double mechanism that's happening.

So the brain processes numbers that are smaller than four in a more precise way than it does for numbers larger than four.

So interesting, right?

It's like...

I think about this all the time where it's like, why is it four?

Like, why not five?

But it's four.

And when I reported that piece, a couple of experts were talking to me about how it's also weirdly related to working memory or awareness.

So people can only really hold a certain number of objects in their awareness, and that's four.

So they think that maybe there's some sort of connection there between, you know,

how we're processing numbers and working memory.

The other group looked more at populations of neurons.

So it was kind of a larger scale.

They used a magnetoencephalography scanner.

That sounds right.

That was impressive.

Long word.

And basically that means that, you know, as the neurons fire, they generate voltages, which creates magnetic fields that the machine can detect.

And by analyzing the magnetic fields, the researchers were able to kind of probe what the neurons were doing when the participants were prompted to think about zero.

That's so cool.