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Comment by anotheryou | Hacker News Reader

I can't turn it off, but I know I can very well do math without words or numbers in my head.

Geometry is the best example, anythig beyond the basics has no good common names and still you can do it in your head.

If you slice through a pair of carrots, how many pieces of carrots are there afterwards? (do this simple thing in your head an than read on)

I slice them imaginary and than start counting what I'm left with. The part where I go from 2 carrots to 4 carrot parts happens without words. Anyone doing it differently? You of course have to be self-observing enough to say more than "I just know" :).

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That might as well be a shortcut, as in your brain has done 2*2 so many times that you have an immediate path for that fixed answer... if this is the case there's no actual calculation performed, as in you can't do the same thing for "what if you slice 73 carrots in half"...

I'm kinda shure I do it visually :)

But yea, get's more difficult with 73. But even there I might determine "visually" that cutting across a row of carrots halfs each of them. So the 2 in 73*2 ist still determined without words.

> if this is the case there's no actual calculation performed

There is no conscious calculation performed. The result might be fetched from memory, but there might also be subconscious processes involved. And that seems to be what the argument is about. Grandparent claims we cannot count without language while the article claims we have estimation hardware builtin (that's count-ish, imo). That's not really conflicting, since GP implies a specific counting process that's usually done consciously. Do the clapping, ask someone unsuspecting how often you have clapped, and he'll probably be able to tell the number without concisely counting. Even for a stream of sensory inputs.

But yeah, consciously thinking about something usually involves words for many of us, as that the most common/effective way for our thoughts to interact with the world.

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