The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics, Revised and Updated Edition - Couverture souple

Dehaene, Stanislas

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0199753873 ISBN 13 : 9780199753871

Editeur : Oxford University Press, USA, 2011

Synopsis

Our understanding of how the human brain performs mathematical calculations is far from complete, but in recent years there have been many exciting breakthroughs by scientists all over the world. Now, in The Number Sense, Stanislas Dehaene offers a fascinating look at this recent research, in an enlightening exploration of the mathematical mind. Dehaene begins with the eye-opening discovery that animals-including rats, pigeons, raccoons, and chimpanzees-can perform simple mathematical calculations, and that human infants also have a rudimentary number sense. Dehaene suggests that this rudimentary number sense is as basic to the way the brain understands the world as our perception of color or of objects in space, and, like these other abilities, our number sense is wired into the brain. These are but a few of the wealth of fascinating observations contained here. We also discover, for example, that because Chinese names for numbers are so short, Chinese people can remember up to nine or ten digits at a time-English-speaking people can only remember seven. The book also explores the unique abilities of idiot savants and mathematical geniuses, and we meet people whose minute brain lesions render their mathematical ability useless. This new and completely updated edition includes all of the most recent scientific data on how numbers are encoded by single neurons, and which brain areas activate when we perform calculations.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Stanislas Dehaene teaches at the College de France and is Director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Research Unit at INSERM.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Oxford University Press, USA
• Date d'édition: 2011
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0199753873
• ISBN 13: 9780199753871
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 352
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Ufficio Anagrafiche Messaggerie; ufficio.anagrafiche@meli.it; ; Via Verdi, 8; Assago Milano; 20090; Italie