10k? 100k? A million?
I am not talking about calculating with numbers, but rather the point where numbers stop being comprehensible, or “no longer mean anything”.
Try visualizing exactly 10000 apples in your mind.
Edit: What I’ve gathered so far from the answers:
Visualizing: <10
Visualization and symbolics are not the only way we comprehend numbers. My mind has the ability to recognize astonishingly broad temporal intervals with remarkable accuracy. I can express the interval using numbers. Does that mean I am able to fully comprehend a number like in “90 minutes?”
I am able to remember sets of things, and distinguish all of the members of that set, up to very large numbers. It would not be unusual for a teacher to be able to call to mind every one of a couple hundred students currently attending their school. If I can manage a set of a particular size in my mind (whether or not I can visualize all the members of that set simultaneously) do I not have some comprehension of that number? What if every student is assigned an integer from a contiguous series, and I can remember each student’s id number?
Some people cannot visualize at all. Do they fail to comprehend every number?
Yes I believe there’s an over-emphasis on the visual here. There’s a low limit on how many distinct objects we can perceive visually at once but that’s not entirely the same as what numbers we can grasp and comprehend.
Anything over a couple million probably. People can comprehend the largest amount with money (instead of apples for example). The fact that most people don’t realize how big of a difference a billion is to a million shows that the average person can really comprehend only up to maybe 7 or 8 digits.
Such a question is entirely and completely subjective in answer.
I am not looking for an exact answer, but rather peoples opinions (“what do you think…”).
You may as well be asking people their favorite color.
infinity is both capable of being conceptualized and larger than any other number, so there’s my answer
10k? 100k? A million?
I am not talking about calculating with numbers, but rather the point where numbers stop being comprehensible, or “no longer mean anything”.
Try visualizing exactly 10000 apples in your mind.You’re quite optimistic. I recall from old Psych classes that visualization breaks down even before double digits, so the 5-9 range. Don’t have any references at hand so I might be misremembering it, but now I’m curious too and will see if I can find anything in my notes.
As an average, I usually see the number 7 bandied around. After that we start “chunking” where each group becomes its own conceptual object.
This is why phone numbers without the area code have 7 digits in North America.
That’s not quite the same thing - the 7 digit phone number has more to do with short-term memory capacity than visual perception. Miller’s Law of short-term memory is we can store 7 +/- 2 items at a time, depending how complex they are.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two
Interesting. I thought you could split numbers into “bundles” (1 bundle of 5 apples, 10 bundles of those, for example).
Edit: Or imagine 5 and then start doubling over and over.
Yes, but then you’re not comprehending all the numbers. There’s no difference between imagining 5 googolplex and 5 dragons.
Comprehension is a weird thing to define.
Like I know what 100 billion is. I can define it, I can say what’s less or more than it. Is that comprehension?
You could take three counters and throw them on a table in front of me and I could intuitively tell you there are 3 counters without individually counting each one. If you threw 20 counters on the table I would have to count all of them individually before I could tell you how many there are. Is that comprehension?
In my opinion any number that could be uniquely described counts as being comprehended by a human. For example I think people can grasp the concept of pi despite not being able to really grasp the infinite nature of it. So any number large enough where you couldn’t uniquely describe it to a person. Which is a pretty useless definition if we’re being honest.
That’s not how the human brain typically works. We summarize, categorize, lump etc so the concept of numbers is understood.
