October 21, 2024
3 1 minute read
How Your Brain Processes Zero (It’s Not Exactly ‘Nothing’)
What we think of when we think of “nothing” is surprisingly complex, neuroscientists find
Many mathematical equations can only be solved thanks to a special human invention: the number zero. In many ways, it’s a strange concept. It is a quantity, determined by absence. As it appeared Relatively recently In the cultural history of our species, this gives rise to many paradoxes – one cannot divide by zero, for example – and is fundamental to mathematics.
However, the word “null” is not easy to understand. “It takes an extra level of abstract thinking to master zero,” says Benji Barnett, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London. “We have to create something out of nothing.”
Zero’s final surprise may be how well the brain has learned to deal with this abstraction. Studies now show that the concept of zero is processed in similar ways to many numbers and can be placed along a mental number line.
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In a recent study by co-authors Andreas Nieder of the University of Tübingen and Florian Moormann of University Hospital Bonn in Germany, researchers showed that the brain processes at least “zero” in… Two distinct places: one for the number and one for the empty set it represents. The team made its discoveries during an experiment conducted on 17 people with epilepsy. All participants had microelectrodes inserted into the temporal lobes in preparation for surgery. The ultra-thin sensors made it possible to observe how individual neurons interact while test subjects focus on a task.
During the experiment, each participant viewed a small screen displaying different sets of numbers from zero to nine, represented on one side as a cloud of dots — where “zero” was an empty cloud — and on the other side as Arabic numerals. By monitoring the brain activity of test subjects, the researchers saw neurons that specifically reacted to the empty set and others that reacted to the number zero.
This finding in itself is not very surprising, says Ben Harvey, a cognitive neuroscientist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who was not involved in this research. He points out that the empty set “is a quantity of physical things…, (while) symbolic numbers, including zero, are linguistic functions, a component of language, not physical things.”
In addition, this same basic pattern — of activating different neurons, for example, for the number 3 instead of three dots — applies to the other numbers studied so far. But the distinction between the empty set and numbers may be especially important when looking at zero. “When you look closely based on behavioral data or neural data, zero is still a little different; it’s still special,” Nieder says. “It’s this weird uncle in the number family.”
For example, he and his colleagues found that it takes longer to process the empty set than the symbolic number 0. Given these findings, Moorman says, “Without these numbers, these symbolic representations, it would be much more difficult to construct any set.” Theory related to mathematics.”
Zero can be conceptualized on several levels, including as an “absence,” a special category of space, or a quantity or number used in calculations. Although many animals have a number sense, Nieder, who has studied crows and monkeys, suspects that only humans use zero mathematically.
Furthermore, digital zero, as used in mathematics, is something humans need to learn from others, and is not an innate concept. Children generally can’t even understand it About the age of six. This is almost two years behind the other numbers.
The idea that zero is somehow different comes from brain injury studies as well. About 14 percent of people who have had a stroke He may be unable To read or process numbers that include a zero, Barnett points out. In August, he and Stephen Fleming, a fellow cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, published results showing that the brain places zeros along… Mental number lineRegardless of whether a person considers zero a number or an empty set. Nieder and Moorman’s team showed the same thing, but in different ways, focusing on different regions of the brain.
“Overall, these two studies are well complementary and go a long way to providing a better understanding of how zero is represented in the human brain,” Fleming says.
This article originally appeared on Spectrum of science It has been reproduced with permission.