Biggest number humans can comprehend?

Pre-College Topics High School Life
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<p>We were talking about this in my physics class, but does anyone know the ballpark of the biggest number a human can comprehend? I’m not talking about the biggest number you can think of. Like if I said, imagine 100 baseballs, I’m sure you could. If I said imagine 1000 baseballs, you would still be able to comprehend it. However, at some point, 10^n baseballs is going to be pretty much the same in your mind as 10^(n+1). I feel like this limit might be at around the million range for me, because if you told me to imagine a million of a thing one day, and ten million of a thing a year later, I would probably have that same mindset and think of basically the same amount.</p>

<p>Any opinions on this?</p>

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<p>check out the video paper clip, in which this TN school was learning about holocaust, except they had hard time comprehending what 6 million jews really meant, so now look at this short film which will explain a lot, [YouTube</a> - Paper Clips](<a href=“Paper Clips - YouTube”>Paper Clips - YouTube)</p>

<p>overal I’d say a googol actually, it’s a huge number but 70! or 70x69x68…3x2x1= ~1.28 googol, and that means 70 people in line could be arranged in a googol ways</p>

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<p>I disagree, I could say around 200!. Anything above that might give me a headache.</p>

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<p>because calculating that would give Mother Earth a massive headache, we always have this number:</p>

<p>∞</p>

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<p>Sushagah, I feel like that’s way too large. The example of ordering 70 people is good, but if you went anywhere on black friday and asked the 71st person how many ways the people in front of him could be organized (assuming they were an average non-mathematician type), I’m sure they’d say something that was at the most a few billion. A googol is a rather ridiculous threshold for the human mind, as there aren’t even a googol atoms in the universe. (googol= 1x10^100, estimate for atoms= 1x10^(79~88)</p>

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<p>I’m pretty sure grahams number is the largest number in existence</p>

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<p>I’m not asking for the largest number ever, I’m asking about at what point the numbers become meaningless and we just think of them as ‘very large.’ I know that 70! is bigger than 69!, but by that point my mind just says, big number, bigger number. Compare this to imagining 100 ants on the floor of your living room vs. 10,000 ants in your living room.</p>

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<p>Hmmm, an interesting analogy would be about the person’s ability to differentiate between low and high and HD quality screens with the pixels being the denoted numbers. So in fact I think millions are possible to visualize,</p>

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<p>I’d say it’s much lower than 1000, I read about some experiments that said people can tell the difference between 10 and 13 dots on a paper (not in columns and rows but arbitrarily placed on the page) with about 90% accuracy. Also he found out that by doubling both numbers, people still can tell the difference with about 90% accuracy</p>

<p>Also in a book I read that there’s possibly a reason that many cultures include similar characters up to three but change the fourth; for example roman numerals are I, II, III, and IV, chinese and ancient Indian apparently also follow something similar, I think they go like _ =, and then one with 3, but then have a different character for 4. It says that the highest number that humans can instantly count is no more than 4</p>

<p>I’m not sure I agree with it being no more than 4, but definitely, glancing at the book shelf in my room I can’t tell that there are 8 books in a row without counting them in some way (you can recognize 5 things, but recognizing whether there are 7, 8, or 9 is more difficult) - it may have been more helpful if all of the books were the same size however.</p>

<p>Not that the previous stuff has to do with comprehension of large numbers, I thought it was interesting that comprehension of small numbers may not be as easy as people think</p>

<p>Also I’d say if you wanted to do an experiment on this, just get a piece of paper and draw 150 dots and then ask people how many dots there are. </p>

<p>A few people with savant syndrome can do this perfectly however, and I think I heard once that monkeys count holistically (by looking at the whole picture instead of counting things one by one) so they may be better at this than humans</p>

<p>I don’t think most people could comprehend 1000 baseballs by the way, how many stars are in the night sky? This article cites it as a no more than a few thousand [url=&lt;a href=“http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/ast99/ast99238.htm]Number”&gt;http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/ast99/ast99238.htm]Number</a> of Stars in the Sky<a href=“the%20interesting%20thing%20is%20the%20stars%20is%20the%20first%20thing%20in%20this%20post%20that%20I%20had%20over-counted”>/url</a></p>

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<p>i mean but imagining a million baseballs is different from imagining a million grains of sand.
i could easily imagine what a million grains of sand would look like (patch of area on the beach)…so when you say comprehend, what type of comprehension are you talking about?</p>

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<p>Number sense is acquired, not innate. Some native West African tribes lack a word for the number 4 or higher in their language. Simply, there is no concept for a unit larger than four. Rather anything larger than that number is said to be a “group”. The same word to describe 100 describes the word 5. In their culture there is no need for calculations or large numbers because life is simpler. Likewise, I read about experiments carried out on human infants and when they were asked to determine groups larger than four, they struggled doing so. What is so mystical about the number 4?</p>

<p>Edit: This is for instant comprehension.</p>

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<p>The only number I can really visualize is 69…</p>

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<p>

I have heard that beyond 4, the human mind, while it can think of an arrangement of that number, is better suited to the concept “many”.</p>

<p>I was going to say 4 because of this reason, if you’re talking about instant and complete comprehension.</p>

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<p>“instant comprehension” was the point of my post</p>

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<p>geoffs is right. I was going to say around 4 or 5. If that doesn’t make sense, try to imagine 10 baseballs. Well what does it look like in your mind? You probably count 10 as 2 groups of 5 or 5 groups of 2, but that means you can’t actually imagine 10 as a whole, only maybe 5 at a time. Our system of mathematics is advanced because it allows us to do easy calculations and tricks for both basic and absurd quantities of things. It’s a language that expediates calculations, though we’re no closer to really comprehending, say, one hundred items than we are to picturing the number 100 instantly in our heads.</p>

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<p>This is truly interesting questions and answers, this definitely will rise to popular question,</p>

<p>a big issue here is that many people are assuming you need to see an actual object like baseballs are grain of sand, but what about the numerical expression in theoretical terms?</p>

<p>Such as distance? People can differenciate by looking at 1 foot or a kilometer, or maybe or less? </p>

<p>a number does not exist, it can only be quantified onto objects, but those objects do not physically show any number, since that would be impossible.</p>

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<p>even with money its the same. like i know what $20 is, but a million is alot, but theres people who have like a few billion dollars.</p>

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<p>Omg that was weird. I thought of 10 baseballs and I thought of them as a “group”, not as 10 individuals. Then I casually imagined 3, 4, and 5 baseballs in my head. At 5 or 6 baseballs I began imagining them as a group. Of course I wasn’t trying to be Einstein… just casually</p>

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<p>I am very much with those who are saying the number is quite small. My feeling before finding this post was that for me at least, the number is three. When I see a stack of DVDs for instance and count them, I find that the quickest way is to count groups of three (“count by threes”). If I count by fours, I’m really counting by two, twice, if that makes sense.</p>

<p>I hesitated to reveal this for fear of being thought a dope; but the fact is, I scored 800 on the math section of the SAT and got a B in Calc II (integral calculus) in college, at a top five engineering school, without studying very hard. So I am better at math than the average bear! But I still do not believe I can directly comprehend a number larger than three, and I think the people who are giving numbers significantly higher than this are kidding themselves or do not really understand the question.</p>

<p>ETA: When you use something like baseballs or coins laid out in a square on a table as an example, I would raise my number to 4 as I can picture four items in a square or rectangle and feel like I comprehend that at once. But where it is three is when they are in a line, so you’re counting them (presumably) left to right.</p>

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<p>

There’s no such things as the largest number in existence. You can add one to any real number and end up with a larger real number that exists.</p>