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This brings up a point that has always eerily intrigued me: Can you even count at all -without- a language? Visually, you might be able to do it; e.g. seeing a

This brings up a point that has always eerily intrigued me: Can you even count at all -without- a language? Visually, you might be able to do it; e.g. seeing a clump of 5 trees and knowing it’s 5 without having to “say” “five” in your head. But try tapping on the desk or clapping your hands and counting how many times you did it without saying/thinking “1, 2, 3, 4...” I wonder if associating a transient stream of inputs with a count may be impossible without mapping it to some other sequence in your head, like linguistic numbers/letters.

hervature 7y ago
Isn't clapping five times enough to count to five? Like saying "one" five times would be enough to convey to me that you mean five.
- Razengan 7y ago
  I meant try clapping, tapping, listening to a repeating sound, or watching cars or people go by, at an arbitrary pace without rhythm, for a while before trying to recall how many it was, without saying a number in your head for each instance you note.
thaumasiotes 7y ago
I have read about what may or may not be a hypothetical example of a shepherd who "counts" his flock by matching sheep passing through a gate with stones put into or taken out of a bag. This is enough to let you know when the number of sheep is wrong, though you won't know what the number is.
- cyrilfiggis 7y ago
  That's how mathematicians count. It's called bijection.
cwkoss 7y ago
My evopsych class in college touched on this. Brains can track a number of discrete objects (from 3 to ~7, depending on species and maturity). Once we get past this number, brains tends to interpret it as 'many'. From the studies we looked at, it appears that the brain can innately count within this number, but reverts to 'many' representation after it. Ex. crows can count three people going into an obscured area with food, and know that once three people have left, it's safe to get the food, as there aren't any people left.
- Razengan 7y ago
  Wow, so language lets us get past that limit. And numbers are a computed property, so we don't have to know all the possible numbers, just the rules: let firstIndex = 0 var nextIndex: Number { return nextNumberBasedOnSomeRules() } And so it's helpful to have a language with a sensible numeric system, after all. :)
  - cwkoss 7y ago
    A similarly interesting study: ability to create sentences using prepositional phrases, like "left of the red wall", predicts performance on a disoriented search task. https://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu/home/ashusterman/ConferencePosters_Public/Nav_SRCD2011_FINAL.pdf https://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu/home/ashusterman/ConferencePos...

hervature 7y ago

Isn't clapping five times enough to count to five? Like saying "one" five times would be enough to convey to me that you mean five.

Razengan 7y ago
I meant try clapping, tapping, listening to a repeating sound, or watching cars or people go by, at an arbitrary pace without rhythm, for a while before trying to recall how many it was, without saying a number in your head for each instance you note.

thaumasiotes 7y ago

I have read about what may or may not be a hypothetical example of a shepherd who "counts" his flock by matching sheep passing through a gate with stones put into or taken out of a bag. This is enough to let you know when the number of sheep is wrong, though you won't know what the number is.

cyrilfiggis 7y ago
That's how mathematicians count. It's called bijection.

cwkoss 7y ago

My evopsych class in college touched on this. Brains can track a number of discrete objects (from 3 to ~7, depending on species and maturity). Once we get past this number, brains tends to interpret it as 'many'. From the studies we looked at, it appears that the brain can innately count within this number, but reverts to 'many' representation after it. Ex. crows can count three people going into an obscured area with food, and know that once three people have left, it's safe to get the food, as there aren't any people left.

Razengan 7y ago
Wow, so language lets us get past that limit. And numbers are a computed property, so we don't have to know all the possible numbers, just the rules: let firstIndex = 0 var nextIndex: Number { return nextNumberBasedOnSomeRules() } And so it's helpful to have a language with a sensible numeric system, after all. :)
- cwkoss 7y ago
  A similarly interesting study: ability to create sentences using prepositional phrases, like "left of the red wall", predicts performance on a disoriented search task. https://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu/home/ashusterman/ConferencePosters_Public/Nav_SRCD2011_FINAL.pdf https://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu/home/ashusterman/ConferencePos...