Visualizing the number of neurons in the brain
If I were to tell you that the human brain has 100 billion neurons, can you picture it in any meaningful way ?
The core problem seems to be the lack of mental machinery for visualizing large numbers; for instance, close your eyes and imagine 2 apples, easy enough right ? 3,4 apples ? 6 apples ? 8 apples ?
If you are like most people your mental buffer ( or visual sketchpad in neuroscience lingo ) starts loosing detail and cohesion around the 4th Apple and struggles around the 7th. 9 are usually not visualized correctly.
One trick you can use is to group them in a grid or other meaningful way (standardizing the shape and removing detail also helps), this is usually called chunking and works for all types of memories, for instance imagine now a group of apples as dots in a grid:
Chunking works by referencing a group as a unit, for instance here we are chunking sets of 6 apples, suddenly…
