this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
1 points (100.0% liked)

Science

13951 readers
2 users here now

Studies, research findings, and interesting tidbits from the ever-expanding scientific world.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

Be sure to also check out these other Fediverse science communities:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
alyaza@beehaw.org
Gaywallet@beehaw.org
remington@beehaw.org
1
Your brain finds it easy to size up four objects but not five — here’s why (www.nature.com)
submitted 2 years ago by Infrapink@kbin.social to c/science@beehaw.org
2 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

An experiment found that the brain uses one set of neural circuits to identify the numbers 1–4; these circuits are very specific to their own numbers. A separate set of circuits respond to the numbers 5–9; these are less precise, and are activated by adjacent numbers.

For this reason, it is easier to determine when there are four things than to determine there are five things.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] rnd@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago

I bet this is also why old-timey phone numbers encoded the first digits with letters. The US had the famous ABC2/DEF3/... system that's still displayed on most keypads, and the former Soviet Union mapped the first letters of the Russian alphabet (skipping З to avoid confusion with 3)...