Making the case for humans’ sense of number The result is far from being a clear picture, and disagreements still abound, but for Butterworth and others like him, multiple threads of evidence are now coming together to support numerosity, and our brain’s encoding of it, as a fundamental part of how we experience the world. Thanks to growing interest in the subject, combined with advances in experimental and technological methods for studying the brain, data are trickling in to support these arguments-and occasionally confuse them. Some scientists assign this number sense an even greater importance, claiming that it’s the foundation for humans’ capacity for numerical reasoning and arithmetic-that there’s a connection between our ability to quickly recognize the number of flowers in a vase, and our ability to understand why 2 + 4 = 6. While some scientists propose that the so-called sense of number is just an offshoot of a more general perception of magnitude-an ability to say roughly how big something is in relation to something else-others argue that numerosity perception is an independent phenomenon, something that gives a special meaning to “four” and “five” as discrete quantities. How numerosity perception works neurologically, and how important it is in human cognition, are tougher questions to answer, and ones that have sparked debate among researchers. (See “ Numerosity Around the Animal Kingdom.”) Moreover, it’s not human-specific: experiments with monkeys, crows, fish, and even bees indicate that numerosity perception, at least for relatively small quantities, is widely distributed across the animal kingdom. It is evident, too, among adults in isolated human populations that typically don’t use numbers much in their daily lives. This ability, known as numerosity perception, is distinct from counting-the process of keeping a tally while going through a set of objects-and is present in infants long before they learn words or symbols for particular numbers. Indeed, that most humans, even from a very early age, can quickly and accurately distinguish among different quantities of things is so obvious that it’s frequently taken for granted. Butterworth is one of several researchers who believe that the human brain can be thought of as having a “sense” for number, and that we, like our evolutionary ancestors, are neurologically hardwired to perceive all sorts of quantities in our environments, whether that serves for selecting the bush with more fruit on it, recognizing when a few predators on the horizon become too many, or telling from a show of hands when a consensus has been reached. In it, he argues that humans and other animals are constantly exposed to and make use of numbers-not just in the form of symbols and words, but as quantities of objects, of events, and of abstract concepts. He’s including the calculation in an upcoming book, Can Fish Count?, slated for publication next year. Brian Butterworth University College Londonīutterworth didn’t conduct his thought experiment just to satisfy his own curiosity. A thousand numbers an hour is sixteen thousand numbers a day, is about five or six million a year. He says: “I reckoned that I experienced about a thousand numbers an hour.
I hazard that it’s well into the hundreds, but admit I’ve never thought about it before.
“Would you like to take a guess?” he asks me when we speak over Zoom a couple of weeks later.
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He went about his day as usual, but kept track of how frequently he saw or heard a number, whether that was a symbol, such as 4 or 5, or a word such as “four” or “five.” He flicked through the newspaper, listened to the radio, popped out for a bit of shopping (taking special note of price tags and car license plates), and then, at last, sat down to calculate a grand total. He picked a Saturday for his self-experiment-as a cognitive neuroscientist and professor emeritus at University College London, Butterworth works with numbers, so a typical weekday wouldn’t have been fair. Earlier this year, Brian Butterworth decided to figure out how many numbers the average person encounters in a day.
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