Numbers and Brains - Numberphile
Your brain seems to treat numbers and words very differently (even if the number is written as a word!). So says cognitive neuropsychologist Brian Butterworth.
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BRIAN BUTTERWORTH: The first patient that we tested formally and in detail was a woman who had kept the accounts of the hotel that her family ran. But after a stroke which affected her left hemisphere, she was unable to deal with numbers above four. Any numbers in any way we presented them. I mean, if we gave her a word for a number above four, she wouldn't know whether it was even a real word or not, let alone what it meant. What was really interesting for us was that everything else seemed to be fine. I mean, her language was fine, she could understand what we were saying perfectly well. She could remember what she'd had for breakfast. She could reason. We gave her lots of reasoning tests. She was absolutely fine. She understood symbols. So we gave her lots of different s...
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BRIAN BUTTERWORTH: The first patient that we tested formally and in detail was a woman who had kept the accounts of the hotel that her family ran. But after a stroke which affected her left hemisphere, she was unable to deal with numbers above four. Any numbers in any way we presented them. I mean, if we gave her a word for a number above four, she wouldn't know whether it was even a real word or not, let alone what it meant. What was really interesting for us was that everything else seemed to be fine. I mean, her language was fine, she could understand what we were saying perfectly well. She could remember what she'd had for breakfast. She could reason. We gave her lots of reasoning tests. She was absolutely fine. She understood symbols. So we gave her lots of different s...
