Someone wanted to know what was happening in their mind when five apples were dropped on the floor and they were asked to count them where they just counting quickly.

Or did they remember what five things look like in response Reddit user surf kate.

YsL gave a great concise explanation of the difference between counting and something called subcutaneous.

Coming from the latin sub noticed meaning sudden subsidizing refers to our brain's ability to suddenly recognize objects up to about four.

Which means that if you see for example, 123 or four pizza john's, you don't have to spend any time looking at each individual pizza jOHN, you just know how many pizza john's there are.

But if you increase that number by even a little more, your mind loses the ability to grasp what it's looking at right away.

Indeed, the time it takes to make a judgment on numbers larger than four increases by about 250 to 350 milliseconds with each consecutive number.

That's because when you move out of the subsidizing range, you actually have to look at each individual item and count them up.

The way we do this is by taking the list of numbers 123456789, 10 and so on and assigning them to the pizza john's in ascending order.

When we reach the end of our set, Whatever number we stopped on is the number of items there are digging a little deeper.

This process of counting as we know it involves five criteria that was a little bit.

First.

The 1 to 1 principle meaning that each object can only have one tag or number name.

Second order nationality, meaning that the tags must be applied in the same order every time.

1234, not 3214589.

Omega Jackson.

Pollock.

3rd.

The cardinal principle or cardinality which I mentioned before, meaning that the last tag always represents the absolute quantity of the set forth, the order irrelevance, which means that it doesn't matter, it's irrelevant which order the objects are counted.

The number will always be the same.

And finally fifth the abstraction principle or the ability to apply counting to a number of varied objects, not just the same one.

Used multiple times counting in this way extrapolated allows us to deal with very large numbers aided by something which is not innate to our minds but is an artificial symbolic system which we've memorized to the point where it feels innate.

We know of a few cultures.

In fact like the Amazonian indigenous group Moon Naraku who don't have words for numbers larger than five or the Brazilian Piiroja people who only have names for one and two above that they just say many.

When tested both the Moon Naraku and pareja people were able to subdue ties small numbers and approximate large numbers with the same relative accuracy as Westerners but they could not gauge the exact amount of many items without the aid of precise number.

Names subsidizing and counting are incredible capabilities of the human brain which we take for granted every day to appreciate just how fast your brain works.

I'll leave you with this, get your paws buttons ready and pause when you know how many items there are.

Go.

The final point I'll make on this is that it seems after a number of studies that human beings are not the only ones able to make quantitative judgments about objects.

Certain species of monkey, horse and bird can subsidize interestingly like us up to about four.

The best review that I found of numerical competence in animals.

Well worth a read was done in 2011 by Zanna Resnick, Ova and Boris Ryabkov, sorry for the name butchery, which I'll leave a link for in the description under work site.

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