Geometry ability available in the brain

Aboriginal people who do not go to school still understand geometric concepts such as circles, rectangles, parallel lines.(iStockphoto)

Amazon hunter hunters do not have written language and have never seen a math book still perform well in geometric problems. This shows that the geometry is available in the brain.

Adults and children have clear concepts such as the focus of the circle and the logical extension of a straight line, regardless of whether or not they have read these concepts.

Professor Stanislas Dehaene at the French University in Paris and colleagues examined 14 children and 30 adults of the Amazon group, called Munduruku, and compared them with American children and adults.

" The Munduruku group naturally uses basic geometric concepts such as points, lines, parallelism, angles to detect differences in simple pictures, and they use both distance and angle. images and their correlations in geometrical maps, to locate hidden objects , "the group said.

" Our results have provided evidence of the existence of geometric intuition, without ever going to school, or interacting with symbols, maps and rich geometrical terms ."

Geometry is also an area of ​​ancient science and de Dehaene's group thinks it originates from its innate ability.

" A lot of theorems in geometry - like two points that make up a straight line, three intersecting axes that make up a point are all considered obvious and have never been questioned about logic, principles and experiments " , researchers say.

There is no way Munduruku people have learned about these concepts. " Most children and adults participate in testing in remote, remote villages and hardly have books, rulers, compasses or maps. Moreover, Munduruku language has very few words. for arithmetic, math, spatial concepts, although many metaphors are used casually ".

" Naturally understanding the geometric concepts of this small population community has demonstrated geometric knowledge, as well as basic arithmetic, already available in the human mind ," researchers said. conclude.

MT