A man who can't see numbers between 2 and 9 | Hacker News Reader

A man who can't see numbers between 2 and 9

sciencefriday.com

3 pointskharak3 comments

I find this fascinating. Without a degree in neurology, I like to imagine what is roughly happening in a coder fashion.

1. RFS (the person with the condition) perceives a digit, 8 for instance. Touching or seeing doesn't matter (article says nothing about hearing). Perception works fine, meaning that the input feed is still working. 2. Something in RFS brain inserts the perceived shape information into some sort of hash function, where the result is then used as key for an index map. The resulting value is the position of the neurons associated with the digit 8. 3. The neurons encoding 8 are still there, but their storage is corrupted (do we know how the brain / neurons store information?). Dutifully, those neurons forward the corrupted data to the mental processing unit. 4. The mental processing unit receives the corrupted data, runs an interpreter, tries to integrate the data with its conscious reality construct and comes to the following conclusion: This is some form of spaghetti. The spaghetti is never the same, as it's always influenced by the conscious reality construct.

If those neurons would have been destroyed, RFS might have relearned those digits. But as the neurons remain, their data stays and can't be updated. Although I still wonder, why exactly they can't be updated and how updating normally works. Maybe the data corruption makes the normal update process physically impossible. Or RFS brain doesn't register the corrupted data as faulty.

Anyway, does anyone know more about this case or the neurology behind it?

In that second video in the article, he's holding a cutout of the number 9. I wonder if he put it on the paper and traced the outline, including the inner circles, what he'd see. Would the lines be accurate until the pen strokes connected to make an '8' and the result would suddenly scramble?

Also, is it the shape itself or the fact that the shape is a number? In other words, if you put a random cutout of the number 8 on a tree branch rather than have him look at a sequence of numbers, would that make any difference?

My guess is, that the moment his brain matches the perceived shape to the stored form of 8, it scrambles. That´s why he can feel the individual forms, like the circles inside the 8, just fine. Also why he can see the horizontal 8 as a mask. A mask is a distinct object, although similar in shape. Makes me wonder, if we have a stored shape for every object we've ever seen.

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