This article was first published on the wechat public account “iBrain-Talk”, please contact the background administrator for authorization to reprint.
The author:
Review:
Numbers rule the universe. — Pythagoras
Whenever we start to think about the world, we inevitably need to use the concept of number. It allows things to be expressed and compared in our brains without relying on physical objects, helping us to distinguish between “quantity” and “degree” and other attributes. There are some basic rules for numbers, such as addition (2+2=4), which exist not only in the human world, but also in the life of other animals.
Over the past few decades, fish, insects and mammals have been shown to be able to make correct judgments about rules such as addition by training animals to learn certain behavior patterns. In a study that trained monkeys to perform a number-size discrimination task, researchers found that neurons in the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) and intraparietal sulcus (IPS) responded selectively to specific numbers, preferring one number to the other. These two regions are anatomically related and are ideal locations for numerical processing, as the LPFC and IPS regions (mainly VIP regions among them) are almost the aggregation points of all highly processed information, which is a prerequisite for abstractly representing numbers [1]. In addition, there is also a relationship between them and the premotor area which can guide the occurrence of individual behavior. Compared to the human population, especially in patients with brain defects, the frontal and temporal lobes have been found to be important for number processing. A meta-analysis of human number processing brain regions found that our inferior parietal lobe, IPS, inferior frontal gyrus, LPFC and medial prefrontal cortex are all involved in number processing [2]. It is not hard to see that this is similar to other mammals, such as monkeys, which may indicate that the number-processing regions of primates are anatomically homologous.
Of course, these animals, long considered nature’s “smart monkeys,” have similar abilities. Even domestic chickens, which have been shunned in many fields, have been found to possess number concepts and algorithms. (They’re really poor in science, you wouldn’t even think they were birds. See Marino 2017)!! The study of the @ donghua king zhihu column chickens also said in chicken | arithmetic, is walking “computing chicken” has done the detailed introduction, there is a general description of. The researchers placed two groups of different numbers of objects in front of five-day-old chickens, blocked them with two partitions, and moved the objects between the two groups. At the end of the move, it was found that the chickens were able to successfully figure out which partition had more items behind it, seemingly performing simple arithmetic in the form of addition and subtraction.
Then, to see how the monkeys’ brains process numbers, the researchers made single-cell recordings of the birds’ brains and found that the caudate side of the nesterium (ok, that’s a name I’m trying to get across), a structure in the endbrain, had a specific response to numbers [4]. Let’s review our evolutionary history. Birds and monkeys can trace their common ancestor back to reptiles over 300 million years ago, and that’s a long time since the two have evolved very different physiologically. So scientists think it may be due to convergent evolution, or the evolution of similar functions under similar environmental pressures. In nature, there is a constant need to make numbers decisions. Monkeys need to decide whether a colony is strong (i.e., how many people there are), and birds need to decide how much food is available. If we expand the concept, we can actually understand similar phenomena found in insects or Marine life.
However, of all the number concepts, “0” is one of the most difficult to understand. Why do you say that?
(In one class)
Teacher: “often say life one, life two, two three, three living things…”
Student: (hands up)
Teacher: “What matter?”
Student: “Teacher, is tao smaller? Isn’t that zero, but is zero plus zero one?”
Teacher (face black) : “it is so that there is born without, the real out of the virtual. You can drop out.”
Emmm…
The number “0” can be said to be a very abstract concept, which is generally understood by humans after the age of 4, and has been thought to be understood only by humans and primates [5]. In Greek times, Aristotle made “0” illegal, destroying uniformity, and treating “0” as a common number led to incomprehensible results (you see, even great philosophers can’t figure out “0”, and you research people are messing with small animals). At that time, people did not begin to consider what symbol to represent the situation of “nothing”, until the concept of “carry” began to appear, people began to use a circle or square symbol to represent empty space. But it’s still treated as a special object, not involved in computation. For a long time, zero was denied a legal “citizen” status.
It is conceivable that the species in the animal kingdom that can figure out the concept of zero is a little genius. Scientists have also grouped these species into “select number of animals” (le SE), which includes primates, dolphins and parrots [6]. Alex, the famous parrot star, is the IQ of the center. Its owner, comparative psychologist Eileen Pepper, said: “Some understanding of nothing seems to be hard-wired, but the concept and application of the number zero is something that is learned.”
In his 27 years with Alex, Pepper found that he instinctively understood concepts like “zero.” Pepper forced Alex to use a label with the word “none” to describe empty objects by giving him the task of color-stacking blocks, and found that Alex could use the label correctly and answer the questions correctly. Pepper also says more research is needed to show that parrots understand concepts similar to “0” in human cognition, and that Alex’s “nothing” may not be exactly “0.” (For more on Alex’s abilities, check out our previous article on the World’s Smartest Parrots.)
Just recently, a new member has successfully entered the “elite Center” : bees!!
Researchers have found that bees can understand abstract concepts such as “equal” and “different”, and that they can evaluate objects up to four when it comes to numbers [7, 8]. This time the researchers found that they also seemed to understand zero, or to compare nothing with a specific value (1, 2) [9].
To test this hypothesis, researchers put bees in a free-flying space (pictured below) and trained them to be “less than.” The bees were shown two different pictures with a white background and several black blocks. The bees were rewarded if they were able to fly to an image with fewer tiles, but suffered if they flew wrong. When they learned the rules correctly, they were given a new stimulus: white pictures with no tiles (oh no!). . They still chose the blank image more than half (64%) of the time. They understand that 0 is less than 2 or 3, or they understand that 0 is less than any other number.
But it’s also possible that bees are more interested in novel stimuli. All the researchers set bees in the “more than” rule group and found that they showed a preference for non-zero images. Suggesting that bees might actually have a concept for the number “0” and be able to apply it to comparison rules. If this is true, it would be astonishing news that bees with fewer than 1,000,000 neurons can grasp the knowledge of humans with more than 86,000,000 neurons.
But do bees really understand zero? Other researchers have raised doubts. Clint Perry, a bee cognition expert at University College London, said that if bees were simply learning the task, that would be based on how often they got sugar water from different types of stimuli, rather than actually learning the size of numbers. For example, when presented with a blank new stimulus, they found that it was both rewarding and preferred it. So bees may not really understand the meaning of zero.
Whatever the truth, the findings from bees and other animals raise an interesting question about how our brains translate “nothing” into the abstract concept of zero. It’s hard for the brain to express an abstract concept, and “nothing” as a quantity is even more challenging. As Nieder says, “After all, the brain has evolved to process stimuli, which means we need ‘something’ to process. Without light, visual neurons don’t send visual messages; Without sound, auditory neurons have no sound information.”
The author press: when one day monkey learned Taylor expansion… emmm
reference
[1]Nieder, A. (2016). The neuronal code for number. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17(6), 366.
[2]Arsalidou, M., & Taylor, M. J. (2011). Is 2+2=4? meta-analyses of brain areas needed for numbers and calculations. Neuroimage, 54(3), 2382-2393.
[3]Marino, L. (2017). Thinking chickens: A review of cognition, emotion, and behavior in the domestic chicken. Animal Cognition, 20(2), 1-21.
[4]Ditz, H. M., & Nieder, A. (2015). Neurons selective to the number of visual items in the corvid songbird endbrain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 112(25), 7827-32.
[5]Okuyama, S., Kuki, T., & Mushiake, H. (2015). Representation of the numerosity ‘zero’ in the parietal cortex of the monkey. Scientific Reports,5, 10059.
[6] Nieder, A. (2016). Representing something out of nothing: the dawning of zero. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(11), 830-842.
[7]Giurfa, M. (2001). Honeybee vision and floral displays : From detection to close-up recognition. Cognitive Ecology of Pollination.
[8]Gross, H. J., Pahl, M., Si, A., Hong, Z., Tautz, J., & Zhang, S. W. (2009). Number-based visual generalisation in the honeybee. Plos One, 4(1), e4263.
[9]Howard, S. R., Avarguèsweber, A., Garcia, J. E., Greentree, A. D., & Dyer, A. G. (2018). Numerical ordering of zero in honey bees. Science, 360(6393), 1124-1126.