A new scientific discovery reveals that the human’s ability to count is as basic as seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching.
Scientists have recognized that the brain has a map that lay outs the nerve cells to create a simple and short routes to allow the easiest interchange between each other.
These topographical characteristics are very typical of the five main senses and this can be indicative that the capabilities of the brain to perceive and compare quantity of things - may it be heaps of paper or number of people in a room - could also be a similarly a basic sense of a human being.
The proponent of this new discovery and a scientist from Utrecht University, Dr. Benjamin Harvey has this to say regarding the brain's association of symbols to the ability to quantify, "We use symbolic numbers to represent numerosity and other aspects of magnitude, but the symbol itself is only a representation."
The study expounds on how the brain assesses the quantity of things actually rely on perceiving them visually at the onset, sending the data from the eyes to the brain. To essentially count, the brain uses the symbols by recognizing and associating them to the proper volume or number.
This research involved several tests to support the said discovery. A certain number of volunteers were asked to look at computer screens and analyze the different patterns of symbols they found there. They were subject to a brain scanner. This magnetic resonance scanner has the ability to determine the areas of the brain that were active during the activity, which reveals the brain's outer cortex is involved in the mentioned counting task.
Dr. Harvey was amazed with the results and said that each particular brain is complicated manifesting different systems. It was surprising for him that the topography they reported was found located consistently among the test subjects and that the “numerosity preferences” have been consistent as well to increase in the same way along the outer cortex.
This study was published in the online journal Science.
