Brain Hard-wired For Geometry?
A few places on the internet are talking about a study conducted on Amazon tribespeople which demonstrates that basic concepts about geometry are independant of culture and level of education.
Here’s the story from Science News and here’s the story from Slashdot.
If this is the case, it suggests that there might be something special about geometry that made it evolutionarily advantageous to hard-wire into the brain. Or, from another perspective, some evolutionary adaptation makes geometry easy for our brains to understand. After all, a triangle is just the combination of three bars, which V1 is very good at responding to. As vision research continues to study the brain’s representation of increasingly complex objects, it may shed light on how this works from a systems neuroscience perspective.
–Stephen
January 22nd, 2006 at 3:23 pm
Yesterday I would have said this study only proves that common-sense is culturally universal, or that at least non-verbal/spatial reasoning is culturally universal, but I’m starting to rethink that perspective based on what I’m learning about Biederman’s “recognition by components” theory of object recognition, which posits that IT uses simple geometric primitives (”geons”) to recognize various objects. Who knows, maybe we are instrinsically-wired to acquire knowledge about geometry! I seriously doubt that it’s a built-in, a priori form of knowledge, however.
And I’m still pretty sure that this study doesn’t prove what it says it proves… The authors themselves admit that the same behavior could have occured simply by applying the concept of similarity to the objects, and although they propose the ‘map test’ to rule out this alternative hypothesis, I think it suffers from the same problem…
January 23rd, 2006 at 10:51 pm
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