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

Science

13034 readers
16 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 2 years ago
MODERATORS
alyaza@beehaw.org
Gaywallet@beehaw.org
remington@beehaw.org
60
Your brain finds it easy to size up four objects but not five — here’s why (www.nature.com)
submitted 1 year ago by Infrapink@kbin.social to c/science@beehaw.org
6 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
[–] JoBo@feddit.uk 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yes. And they had letters grouped with the numbers because 26+ keys is a lot to fit on a small but still usable keyboard (or dial, originally).