Complexity Digest 2008.36 - 09.01

4-Sept-2008

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Number Forms In The Brain, J. Cog. Neurosc. Bookmark and Share

Excerpts: Mental images of number lines, Galton's "number forms" (NF), are a useful way of investigating the relation between number and space. Here we report the first neuroimaging study of number-form synesthesia, investigating 10 synesthetes with NFs going from left to right compared with matched controls. (...) revealed no difference in brain activation during a task focused on number magnitude but, in a comparable task on number order, synesthetes showed additional activations (...), suggesting that NFs are essentially ordinal in nature. Our results suggest that there are separate but partially overlapping neural circuits for the processing of ordinal and cardinal numbers, (...).