Number Sense
/2 min read
The linear number line is not as intuitive as we think, and may well be the cultural step required for us to remember large numbers.
The linear number line is not as intuitive as we think, and may well be the cultural step required for us to remember large numbers.
Our modern understanding of numbers and their magnitudes is not as simple a matter as we think. We seem to believe that this notion is innate in us, that we intuitively know that the difference between 100 and 105 is the same as the difference between five and ten. This is indeed how we map numbers on the number line we are familiar with from school, where numbers are equally spaced. But consider how we actually deal with the notion of numbers when it matters. The difference between someone earning Rs 10,000 a month and someone earning a
Rs 1 lakh a month seems much larger than between someone earning Rs 1 lakh and Rs 2 lakh a month. This intuitive way of thinking about numbers seems to be naturally ingrained in us, or so research published in the journal Science suggests.
Work carried out among the Munduruku, an Amazonian tribe with a limited vocabulary of number words and spatial terms, showed adults and children spontaneously placing numbers on a line such that smaller numbers appeared at greater spatial intervals. In other words, exactly as we all intuitively think of numbers. In this context, it is exactly the modern number line which is the innovation, and research suggests it is key to our ability to remember numbers. It seems as children grow under our modern schooling system, as their number line changes from our intuitive idea to the linear one taught in school, with small and large numbers the same distance apart, they become better at remembering numbers. Another study found that aboriginal children in Australia—from two communities which do not have words or gestures for numbers—were able to copy and perform number-related tasks. In other words, comparisons of size could be made without words for numbers, but the ability to manipulate individual numbers, so vital to our technological society, seems to rely on the linear number line.