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by Jim Holt
One morning in September, 1989, a former sales representative in his mid-forties entered an examination room with Stanislas Dehaene, a young neuroscientist based in Paris. Three years earlier, the man, whom researchers came to refer to as Mr. N, had sustained a brain hemorrhage that left him with an enormous lesion in the rear half of his left hemisphere. He suffered from severe handicaps: his right arm was in a sling; he couldn’t read; and his speech was painfully slow. He had once been married, with two daughters, but was now incapable of leading an independent life and lived with his elderly parents. Dehaene had been invited to see him because his impairments included severe acalculia, a general term for any one of several deficits in number processing. When asked to add 2 and 2, he answered “three.” He could still count and recite a sequence like 2, 4, 6, 8, but he was incapable of counting downward from 9, differentiating odd and even numbers, or recognizing the numeral 5 when it was flashed in front of him.

To Dehaene, these impairments were less interesting than the fragmentary capabilities Mr. N had managed to retain. When he was shown the numeral 5 for a few seconds, he knew it was a numeral rather than a letter and, by counting up from 1 until he got to the right integer, he eventually identified it as a 5. He did the same thing when asked the age of his seven-year-old daughter. In the 1997 book “The Number Sense,” Dehaene wrote, “He appears to know right from the start what quantities he wishes to express, but reciting the number series seems to be his only means of retrieving the corresponding word.”
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Mundurukú人似乎已经发展出了一点文化工具来增长其天生的数字感觉。有趣的是，我们写下的特别的计数符号跟踪这一个相似阶段的踪迹。前三个罗马数字I、II和III，是由最常用符号I形成的；而第四个符号IV,就没有这么清晰。同样的原理可用在中国数字上，前三个数字一、二、三都是由横道构成，但第四个，即四，其型式就不同了。就连阿拉伯数字也遵循同样的逻辑：1是一根竖道，2和3分别是有2根和3很横道为了方便书写连起来而构成的。（德阿那观察道：这是一间很美的小事，但是我不认为在我们的大脑中用极短的时间就能形成这种编码。）

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皮亚杰的观点，到二十世纪五十年代已成为一种标准，但心理学家已经开始认为他低估了婴幼儿的算术能力。 6个月大的婴儿已显露出对普通物体的数目与敲击的鼓声次数相对应的同步性，当其鼓声的数目与物体数目相匹配时，婴儿会较长时间地盯着那些象相匹配的物体。现在，人们普遍认为，婴儿配备一个基本的能力来感知和表达数字。 （这同样表现在许多种动物中，包括蝾螈、鸽子、浣熊、海豚、鹦鹉和猴子），如果进化让我们具备了表达数字的方法，体现在原始的数字感觉，而文化则提供了另外两个要素：数和数字。更多内容请点击煎蛋
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