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This is significant because we really don’t know how the brain handles math.
Brain edu math code#
The aforementioned research teams recently published a fascinating paper titled “Neuronal codes for arithmetic rule processing in the human brain.”Īs the title intimates, the researchers identified an abstract code for processing addition and subtraction inside the human brain. It might seem sub-optimal, but the human brain really doesn’t care whether you use numbers, words, or concepts when it comes to math. As people trickled in from a hard day of hunting, gathering, and whatnot, you could shift the pebbles from one container to another as an accounting method. If you had to keep track of dozens of cave-mates, for example, you might carry a pebble to represent each one. Instead, they found other methods for expressing quantities or tracking objects such as holding up their fingers or using representative models. They didn’t randomly forget how many children they had just because there wasn’t a bespoke language for numerals yet. Prehistoric humans still had things to count. Numbers showed up in human history approximately 6,000 years ago with the Mesopotamians, but our species has been around for about 300,000 years. It’s great at math, but numbers are a relatively new concept for humans. Your brain probably isn’t wired for numbers. This might seem like old hat to most of us, but it’s actually quite an amazing feat of brain power.Īnd, based on some recent research by a pair of teams from the University of Bonn and the University of Tübingen, these simple processes could indicate that you’re a quantum computer.
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You did math based on prompts designed to appeal to entirely different parts of your brain and you displayed the ability to recall previous information when queried later. You’ve just performed a series of advanced brain functions.
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