(...ducking)
Posted on 01/20/2006 3:11:23 AM PST by Pharmboy
Amazonian hunter-gatherers who lack written language and who have never seen a math book score highly on basic tests of geometric concepts, researchers said on Thursday in a study that suggests geometry may be hard-wired into the brain.
Adults and children alike showed a clear grasp of concepts such as where the center of a circle is and the logical extension of a straight line, the researchers report in this week's issue of the journal Science.
Stanislas Dehaene of the College de France in Paris and colleagues tested 14 children and 30 adults of an Amazonian group called the Munduruku, and compared their findings to tests of U.S. adults and children.
"Munduruku children and adults spontaneously made use of basic geometric concepts such as points, lines, parallelism, or right angles to detect intruders in simple pictures, and they used distance, angle, and sense relationships in geometrical maps to locate hidden objects," they wrote.
"Our results provide evidence for geometrical intuitions in the absence of schooling, experience with graphic symbols or maps, or a rich language of geometrical terms."
Geometry is an ancient field and Dehaene's team postulated that it may spring from innate abilities.
"Many of its propositions -- that two points determine a line, or that three orthogonal axes localize a point -- are judged to be self-evident and yet have been questioned on the basis of logical argument, physical theory, or experiment," the researchers wrote.
There was no way the Munduruku could have learned these ideas, they added.
"Most of the children and adults who took part in our experiments inhabit scattered, isolated villages and have little or no schooling, rulers, compasses, or maps," they wrote.
"Furthermore, the Munduruku language has few words dedicated to arithmetical, geometrical, or spatial concepts, although a variety of metaphors are spontaneously used."
They designed arrays of six images, each of which contained five conforming to a geometric concept and one that violated it.
"The participants were asked, in their language, to point to the weird or ugly one," the researchers wrote.
"All participants, even those aged 6, performed well above the chance level of 16.6 percent," they found. The average score was nearly 67 percent correct -- identical to the score for U.S. children.
"The spontaneous understanding of geometrical concepts and maps by this remote human community provides evidence that core geometrical knowledge, like basic arithmetic, is a universal constituent of the human mind," they concluded.
Hi Phantom! Ummm, I noticed you mentioned something about a math ping list and I just wanted to..ummmm..say....you don't need to worry about adding me to the list. :-) Just kidding. I hope you had a great day!
The spontaneous understanding of geometrical concepts and maps by this remote human community provides evidence that core geometrical knowledge, like basic arithmetic, is a universal constituent of the human mind,"
I think geometry is very basic to human understanding of the universe such a navigation and sailing. How about you?
It would appear that geometric thinking, which is needed in navigation would be a survival of the fittest skill and those who had it, had better chances of survival. Without navigation skills, the hunters and gatherers were stuck in one place or might constantly be getting lost! LOL
Navigation skills on the water was another survival skill needed as civilization progressed. Those without knowledge of basic geometry for navigation were at a disadvantage, evolutionarily speaking.
It seems like you did an excellent job, integrating play and academics. One aspect of play that's often ignored is that it should at least sometimes be creative and a bit disorganized. Maybe provide some direction or suggestion, but give the child some space for natural development.
My son was fortunate enough to be brought up in an environment where the kids could do things...ride bikes, fish, build things, invent rules for baseball around the number or players, etc. It's amazing...everyone of those kids has grown into a responsible adult, with careers that somehow relate to their preferences when they were "playing"!
I agree and I think it's something you either have or you don't. The brain needs to be able to manipulate the spatial data and if someone doesn't "see" the relationships they can't do it. Learning something doesn't mean that it's understood and can be be put to use.
I thought everyone had the same ability for "seeing" that I did until I took one of those lovely scholastic aptitude tests in school. I scored in the 99th percentile in Spatital Relations and Abstract Reasoning. The funniest part of that test was that they thought I was a guy, because, as I'm sure you know, women (girls) don't score high in those areas. ;-)
(...ducking)
LOL Too funny!
Ah-ha! Interesting thought. Thank you.
What you say is very interesting! Thank you. We must be wired very similarly then. I also scored high in spatial relations. I like to think it is similar to intuition, but who knows, that's a whole 'nother area of study. I didn't know it was a male/female thing. The more I learn, the more I realize how little I know.
Going to Newport Beach today for a statistical reliability and maintainability symposium. (yes, I am a nerd.) Wonder if there are any other FReepers in that part of So Cal? Wonder what the weather will be like?
I think I posted this on the wrong thread yesterday. Ever hear of the Golden Ratio? A very incredible geometric spatial relationship that was used in ancient architecture! Mind boggling. I love it!
http://www.jimloy.com/geometry/golden.htm
Intuit; what is it normally?
Don't understand what you mean. What is known about intuition?
"Never let your schooling interfere with your education." Mark Twain
I once had a deck of cards with an insert encouraging parents to play cards with their kids in order to promote counting and arithmetic skills.
A long time ago my mother maxed the New York State Regents exam in geometry. She was Irish. She came from a line of Irish Lacemakers and seamstresses. Look at those Celtic designs and ask yourself if they are not intricately and exactly geometric?
In fact, many believed that Euclid’s was the only geometry that the human mind was capable of knowing. Immanuel Kant, the influential eighteenth-century philosopher, taught that Euclidean geometry was ordained to be true by the very structure of the human intellect; space could not even be conceived to be otherwise. Therefore, Kant concluded, Euclidean geometry was an example of synthetic a priori knowledge—it was a truth about the world that could be known to be true without doing any experiments.
Kant, of course, was all wet, but many people believed him anyway Carl Friedrich Gauss, however, saw through Kant’s overconfidence.
Gauss, the greatest mathematician since Newton, realized that geometry could, logically, be construed in a way different from Euclid’s. Unfortunately Gauss was a perfectionist, who was therefore reticent about publishing...
More discussion:
On Gauss' Mountains and
Riemann for Anti-Dummies Part 47
ULTIMATE PROOF OF CREATIONISM BUMP!
I should have pinged you as well
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