Yasemin Saplakoglu

So they actually, they were looking for something called the numerical distance effect, which is basically a phenomenon that occurs when the brain processes non-zero numbers.

And it means that it can more easily distinguish numbers that are far apart from each other than those that are close together.

So the brain has a little bit more difficulty distinguishing between like seven and eight versus seven and 10, for example, or seven and 11.

So the idea for both these groups was that we should see if zero also is part of this numerical distance effect, because if it is, then the brain might be seeing zero just as it does the other numbers.

Just a normal number.

Yeah.

So the first group, the one that looked at a bigger scale, found that the brain processes zero similarly to other numbers.

Basically, it puts zero at the start of a mental number line, like it's before one.

Excellent.

It showed the numerical distance effect, which is what they were looking for.

So their conclusion was there's no difference in the way that the brain sees zero than the other numbers.

Zero in terms of both the digit zero and like zero objects.

The second group also found that the brain puts zero before one on the mental number line, but they found subtle differences that still made zero special in the brain.

So, for example, they found that more neurons had zero as their preferred number than other small numbers.

That suggested to them that the brain might be representing, you know, this empty set with more neurons.

accuracy than it does for other small quantities.

But this was only true for quantity zero.

For the digit zero, they did not find any difference.

Like the brain saw the digit zero like it does the other digits, like one, two, three.

Yeah.