Neuroscientists are exploring whether shapes like squares and rectangles — and our ability to recognize them — are unique to humankind.
In an article published by the American newspaper "New York Times", writer Siobhan Roberts said that during a workshop in the Vatican, Stanislas Dehaene, writer and cognitive neuroscientist from the College de France in Paris, gave a presentation supporting His research is to understand what makes humans special.
Dr. Stanislas Dehaene has spent decades researching the roots of the human mathematical instinct (Getty Images)
Is mathematics an instinct?
The writer explains that Dehaene spent decades researching the roots of the human mathematical instinct, and this was the subject of his 1996 book "Number Sense How the Mind Creates Mathematics." Understand the types of thoughts or calculations unique to the human brain. Dehaene believes part of the answer lies in our instinct to perceive geometric shapes.
The writer points out that the Vatican workshop, organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, dealt with the topic of "symbols, myths and the religious sense in humans since antiquity", that is, since the appearance of the first humans a few million years ago.
Dehaene began his presentation with a set of photographs showing symbols engraved in the rocks such as sickles, axes, animals, the sun, stars, spirals, zigzags, parallel lines and points, and some of the photos he took during a trip to the Valley of Marvels in southern France.
The writer shows that these inscriptions may be from the Bronze Age, i.e. from about 3300 BC to 1200 BC, and others are between 70,000 and 540 thousand years old. On the other hand, for Hahn, the tendency to fantasize about the triangle and the laws of physics is the enigma that captures the essence of man.
Humans recognized all the geometric shapes shown to them (Getty Images)
Human abilities and baboons
The writer says that last spring, Dehaene, in collaboration with Dr. Matthias Sablel-Meyer, conducted a study that compared the ability of humans and baboons to perceive geometric shapes, in which the team wondered what the simplest task in the engineering field - apart from natural language, culture and education - would reveal the difference between human primates. And non-human?
According to Moira Dillon, a cognitive scientist at New York University who collaborated with Dr. DeHaene on other research, this research dates back many years, as Plato believed that humans were the only beings capable of distinguishing between geometric shapes, While linguist Noam Chomsky has argued that language is a biologically rooted human ability, DeHaene aims to use geometry as Chomsky used language.
According to the author, in the experiment people were shown 6 quadrilaterals, and they were asked to discover a shape that differed from the others, and for all the human participants - they were French adults and children as well as adults from rural areas of Namibia who did not receive formal education - this task was " Annoying" is much easier when the basic or outer shapes are regular, parallel sides and right angles.
The researchers called this the "geometric regularity effect," noting how fragile this hypothesis is.
In contrast, the team found that baboons could not distinguish between geometric shapes. Twenty-six monkeys participated in the research conducted by Joel Fago, a cognitive psychologist at Aix-Marseille University, while the monkeys achieved excellent results when shown pictures of them. Non-geometric, similar to watermelon slices, but as soon as geometric shapes were shown on them, their performance deteriorated significantly, the writer said.
Humans live in an environment where angles and shapes make them distinguishable (Getty Images)
Fruit, flower and geometry
"The results were astonishing, and there really appears to be a difference between the perception of shapes by humans and baboons," explains Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University, in an email. human uniqueness, we must wait for the results of research on apes.”
De Waal continues, "The authors argue that humans lived in an environment of pervasive angles and shapes that made them distinguishable, while baboons lived in an environment that was disorganized and devoid of geometric shapes."
The author explains that for further investigation, researchers tried to confirm the results they obtained about the performance of humans and baboons with artificial intelligence, by using neural network models inspired by basic mathematical ideas of what neurons do and how they communicate, and these results - in turn - posed a challenge to artificial intelligence.
“It is very impressive, but I think there is a profound aspect that is missing, which is symbol processing, that is, the ability to manipulate symbols and abstract concepts, as the human mind does,” said Dr. Dehaene, while Yoshua Bingyu, a computer scientist at the University of The University of Montreal stressed that "current artificial intelligence lacks the ability to understand symbols," stressing that "Dr. Dehaene's research provides evidence that human minds have capabilities that we have not yet found in the latest machine learning techniques."
We can never tell a geometric triangle by the triangle we see on paper (Getty Images)
Knowing the triangle
The writer quotes the French mathematician Rene Descartes as saying that "we can never know the geometric triangle through the triangle that we see drawn on paper if our minds have no idea about it elsewhere," noting that based on the research that appeared in the eighties, they suggested "the language of Ideas" to understand the process of encoding geometric shapes in the brain.
In a similar simulation, they established an inductive program that simulates mental programming - which is formed as soon as a figure is seen - according to its inputs and outputs, which is seen as a major obstacle in the field of artificial intelligence, which is why Josh Tenenbaum, a computational perception scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, seeks to create an inspired system From the thinking process rather than simple mathematical ideas that simulate the mechanism of action of a neuron.
The writer points out that through this new study, Dehaene and Matthias Sable Maier began to propose a programming language for drawing shapes, but the new - as Sable Mayer said - was not just a language suggestion, as "there should be thousands of them now, starting with" Logo ". (Logo) in the 1960s and a whole lot of derivative turtle drawings.” Rather, it is the creation of a language that mimics our human competence in engineering, because the language consists of geometrical alternatives, including the basic building blocks of shapes, as well as rules that show how to combine them to produce symmetries and patterns.
The ultimate goal of inventing such a language is not just drawing, says Sableh-Meyer, but to develop a plausible theory of how ideas or calculations are processed in the brain.
A few years ago, PhD student Kevin Ellis developed an artificial intelligence algorithm called DreamCoder, which simulates the mechanism of the brain's use of the programming language to optimally process shapes.
In doing so, the algorithm follows the simplest possible program for any given shape or pattern, which is derived from the brain's processing mechanism for shapes.
The areas of the brain that responded to the language of geometry are called the Mathematics Responsive Network (the island)
engineering language
The author points out that researchers developed a programming language to generate more complex shapes through the theory that the brain similarly encodes shapes as programs in the language, and then tested people's ability to process shapes of varying complexity generated by the programming language.
During one test, they measured how long it took people to memorize a shape like a zigzag, compared to the time it took to find that shape among a set of 6 similar zigzag lines, and the researchers found that the more complex the shape and the longer it was programmed, the more difficult it was to remember. or distinguish it from other forms.
The researchers now hope - according to the author - to delve deeper into symbolic thought in Dr. Dehaene's neuroimaging laboratory "Nerospin", using magnetic resonance to measure neural activity when people are exposed to a set of geometric shapes, as Dehaene already has some data showing that areas of the brain The concerns - in the frontal and parietal lobes - overlap with those known to be associated with the human "sense of numbers".
The author concludes his article by noting that the areas of the brain that respond to engineering language are called the Math-Responsive Network, a name given by DeHaene and former PhD student Marie Amalric. "Language is often assumed to be the defining characteristic of the human race," but perhaps there is something more important. "We suggest that there are multiple languages, and that language in fact may not have started as a communication tool, but in fact as a representational device, That is, the ability to represent facts about the outside world.