“The brain performs feats of math to make sense of the world”
“The researchers found that our brains can accurately track the likelihood of several different explanations for what we see around us. They traced these abilities to a region of the brain located just behind our eyes known as the orbitofrontal cortex. This work was published July 27 in the Journal of Neuroscience.
“When I try to cross the street, I’m not actually analyzing every bit of the scene,” said Yael Niv, an associate professor of psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI) who co-authored the study. “I’m constructing a narrative that I base my decision on, such as, ‘That car is slowing down because of the red light.’…
To find out where and how the brain tracks these probabilities, the team needed to coax their study participants to compare probabilities without thinking about actual numbers. If participants tried explicitly to do the math, they would fail, said co-author Kenneth Norman, professor of psychology and PNI. “Our brains are horrible at arithmetic. Our implicit computations are so much better than our explicit computations,” Norman said.”
I think this is one of the things that drew me into neuroscience (though I don’t anticipate studying it, I’m a molecular/biomedical scientist, not cognitive/computational). It’s remarkable the calculations we make, the way we can see someone biking towards us and know where we would meet and planning which direction to move in at what speed so that we won’t crash into each other, all while maintaining a conversation and doing the same calculations for several other objects.
We are all constant geniuses.
Also — The author of this paper was my TA one year, for this truly awful course that she definitely caught all the burden of. So give her some clicks on her journal article
Related: “The experience of mathematical beauty and its neural correlates”
