but they missed that I also wanted a good cigar!
Posted on 09/25/2009 7:41:52 PM PDT by underthestreetlite
By carefully analyzing brain activity, scientists can tell what number a person has just seen, research now reveals. They can similarly tell how many dots a person was presented with.
Past investigations had uncovered brain cells in monkeys that were linked with numbers. Although scientists had found brain regions linked with numerical tasks in humans - the frontal and parietal lobes, to be exact - until now patterns of brain activity linked with specific numbers had proven elusive.
Scientists had 10 volunteers watch either numerals or dots on a screen while a part of their brain known as the intraparietal cortex was scanned - it's a region of the parietal lobe especially linked with numbers. They next rigorously analyzed brain activity to decipher which patterns might be linked with the numbers the volunteers had observed.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Oh snap! They are going to be coming for me for sure.
0I812
Maybe they can tell me which of those numbers to use on the next powerball ticket. lol..
Accountants and telephonemen would drive them nuts... their heads are filled with numbers.
12:45. Restate my assumptions...
but they missed that I also wanted a good cigar!
sure, it'll work just like a voice analysis phone system works...
G-20 financial meetings will never be the same.
i heard that... 
Aha! Just as I thought. Math and numbers are a figment of the
imagination. It is a false system because it is based on
what the brain does and not on any objective reality. So, if
your brain can respond to number of dots, or Arabic shaped lines,
that is your reality <(or truth)....but it’s not necessarily real
(truth) to others.
Therefore math is now a subjective condition or “truth”. No one
will have to worry about being right or wrong when it
comes to mathematics.It doesn’t have
to be taught as the truth. We can now take it out of the science
curriculum and put into anthropology or psychology, or even
philosophy.
(sarcasm mode: now OFF)
Hey! What happens in the intraparietal cortex, stays in the intraparietal cortex.
They won’t see any numbers in my head! NONE! I am thankful someone invented the pocket calculator.
Nice spot for infinity...
Given the old maxim about an infinite number of monkeys and typewriters, one can assume that said simian digits will type up the following line from Hamlet an infinite number of times.
“I could confine myself to a nutshell and declare myself king of infinity”.
This quote could almost be an epithet for the mathematician Georg Cantor, one of the fathers of modern mathematics. Born in 1845, Cantor obtained his doctorate from Berlin University at the precocious age of 22. His subsequent appointment to the University of Halle in 1867 led him to the evolution of Set Theory and his involvement with the until-then taboo subject of infinity.
Within Set Theory he defined infinity as the size of the never-ending list of counting numbers (1, 2, 3, 4….). Within this he proved that sub-sets of numbers that should be intuitively smaller (such as even numbers, cubes, primes etc) had as many members as the counting numbers and as such were of the same infinite size. By pairing off counting and even numbers together, we see that the number of counting and even numbers must be the same:
1 -> 2
2 -> 4
3 -> 6
4 -> 8
5 -> 10
6 -> 12
He then went on to demonstrate the impossibility of pairing off all the real numbers (those including irrational decimals like Pi) with the counting numbers, concluding that one was larger than the other. The result, confusing though it may seem, is that some infinities are bigger than others!
Cantor’s work represented a threat to the entrenched complacency of the old school mathematicians. Up until then infinity, to quote mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, had been treated as a “way of speaking and not as a mathematical value”. This stonewalling inevitably brought Cantor into conflict with his less enlightened peers. His most vocal critic was Leopold Kronecker (ironically one of Cantor’s past professor) who undertook a personal crusade to discredit his lapsed protégé. Using his position at the University of Berlin he dedicated himself to rubbishing Cantor’s ideas and ruining him personally. His coup de grace was blocking Cantor’s lifelong ambition of gaining an appointment at the University of Berlin.
In 1884, consigned to a backwater University and under constant attack from Kronecker, Cantor had his first nervous breakdown. He spent the rest of his life in and out of mental institutions, his serious work at an end. Cantor’s later years may have been defined by tragedy but his contribution to modern mathematics is colossal. His one-time collaborator David Hilbert once said of him in tribute “No one will drive us from the paradise that Cantor has created.”
Thanks!
Hmmm. I wonder what numbers they’d see in Obama’s head.....999 maybe? ; )
In what sense is 'what the brain does' different than 'objective reality'? Unless you are an idealist then 'what the brain does' is part of 'objective reality'.
"that is your reality <(or truth)....but it’s not necessarily real (truth) to others"
In what way does the article support relativism as a valid philosophical theory? Relativism has by and large been relegated to the philosophical dustbin. It is inherently self-contradictory and incoherent. This article does nothing to further that philosophical dead end.
"No one will have to worry about being right or wrong when it comes to mathematics"
It may be impossible for us to attain the absolute truth, but we seem to be able to get to really good approximations of the truth that we can all pretty much agree on. These approximations of the truth allow us to build bridges, airplanes, cars, etc. that seem to work pretty well for their intended purposes.
If little Mary or little Joey gets a gold star in first grade for adding two and two and getting three, and little Mary or little Joey is OK with that, then they just won't end up becoming scientists or engineers.
"We can now take it out of the science curriculum and put into anthropology or psychology"
Anthropology and psychology are generally considered valid scientific endeavors. So by putting something into 'anthropology' or 'psychology' you are not taking it out of the science curriculum.
" or even philosophy"
There is already a a field called the Philosophy of Mathematics. It is quite interesting and useful:
thanks, bfl
OICU812
My pleasure.
ABCD puppies?
LMNO puppies.
OSDR. CMPN?
It's not in PubMed yet.
Distinct patterns were evoked by symbolic and nonsymbolic number formats, and individual digits were less accurately decoded (albeit still with significant accuracy) than numbers of dots.
Ah, but it *can* be read from the brain activity patterns of the researchers... ;’)
There were vast combinations of these numbers. Sometimes we'd talk about what we saw, and it turned out we all saw the same thing ~ kind of roadmap and all the numbers were on there at the links between lines.
Just guessing now but linemen may all see the same thing ~ and it'd make sense if it were actually portrayed in the brain the way these researchers appear to be finding it.
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