While not exactly a statistic, this week's blog question – relating to counting and observation – did remind me of something that I read a long time ago that has stuck with me. One of my favourite books is Watership Down by Richard Adams. If you have not read it, it is a very nice book about some bunnies that go on a grand adventure. Honestly, it is a great book.
One of the reasons the book is interesting is for some of the concepts and words that are introduced. For example, the rabbits in the novel have a word for being paralyzed with fear – "tharn" – that really captures that feeling better than any English word I can think of. I also remember in the book "The Stand", Stephen King uses "tharn", and discuses how well it captures that feeling of being like a deer in the headlights.
But the word and concept from Watership Down that this week's blogging question reminded of is "hrair": which is the rabbit's word for any number that is greater than five. So it can mean "five" or "five thousand". The reason for this is that the rabbits in the book do not have the concept of any number greater than four. Like the Sherlock Holmes quote in the blogging question, they can see numbers greater than four, but they have no way to really observe them.
It has stuck with me because I have come to believe that the concept of "hrair" is something that is not unique to the fictional rabbits in the book. I have heard that there are some languages that do not use numbers, but concepts of "many" and "few". But more than that, I think that most people are not really able to intuitively understand numbers. Yes, we can discuss them as concepts, but it is difficult for us to really visualize and understand numbers. I have a suspicion that they may be a sort of social construct. To really understand what the difference between five thousand or five million is something that is, I believe, not actually grasped by most people.
I would be curious to know what the limits are to human understanding of numbers; if we are like the rabbits and cannot really comprehend numbers greater than four. I might consider making this into a research project (either as an experiment, or to see if it has been done before). This is especially so
after the results of the first assignment; I think I need to change my research direction from my first paper. The final paper for this class has me feeling a bit tharn :)
I think that there are definitely limits to the human understanding of numbers, especially in APA format! Data visualization is supposed to help with those limitations by providing readers with a different perspective but I think that the APA formatting rules for data visualization are extremely limiting, so the new perspective isn't all that new. I would like to know what the limits for human understanding of APA formatted graphs are : )
ReplyDeleteYou aren't the only one feeling tharn about the final.
I need to reread Watership Down.
Yes, I should re-read Watership Down as well. It is one of the books that I recommend that everyone read. It is one of those books that really creates a convincing fantasy world, and it becomes something that you can take with you. Reading fiction can be surprising because – like in the case of the books I have mentioned: Watership Down and Dune – a fictional story can contain and convey ideas that would be otherwise difficult to encounter and comprehend.
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