Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) / quote 87 of 171
Number sense is like color perception
Dehaene further likens our perception of math to how we perceive color. Color is not an objective property of the world that exists independently of human brains. Color does not exist in the world. Our brains create color when certain wavelengths of light hit our eyes, and they do this in a way that is very useful for navigation through our environment. It is also very useful to have a number sense because it corresponds to salient features of the world that we need to understand in order to survive and reproduce. This is much like our faculty for language, which is also part of our biological endowment. Advanced mathematics, then, is the result of rapid cultural evolution that began in places like Polynesia in fits and starts but then really took off in Mesopotamia with the invention of writing. For reasons that science has yet to work out, the human brain has an amazing capacity to recycle neuronal real estate and use areas that originally served other functions for novel functions that may arise due to culture. Reading and writing are primary examples of this. Advanced mathematics and digital computers are further examples of the incredibly rapid pace of cultural invention. To tie this into the broad theme of this book, I propose that both language and math are representations created by our brain based partly on external signals it receives through our senses. Language and math are based partly on intrinsic principles of our brain’s…