creators_name: Havel, Ivan M. creators_id: havel@cts.cuni.cz editors_name: Cintula, P. editors_name: Haniková, Z. editors_name: Švejdar, V. type: bookchapter datestamp: 2010-09-13 03:58:49 lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:57:40 metadata_visibility: show title: Seeing Numbers ispublished: pub subjects: percep-cog-psy full_text_status: public keywords: subitizing, phenomenal experience, numerical savants, mental number processing, prime number recognition note: The full name of the conference (it did not fit into the slot "Chapter"): Beauty of Logic II abstract: In 1890 William James listed several “elementary mental categories” that he postulated as having a natural origin. Among them, alongside the ideas of time and space, he also listed the idea of number. A symptomatic feature of Informatics as well as Cognitive Science today is the tendency not to talk so much about ideas as about their representations, either in the computer or in the brain. Taking up somewhat different perspective I will discuss the way natural numbers, viewed as counts of real or imagined objects, may be experienced phenomenally. I put forth even some speculative ideas about mental number processing by numerical savants. date: 2010-12 date_type: published publication: Witnessed Year: Essays in Honour of Petr Hajek publisher: College Publications pagerange: 71-86 refereed: TRUE referencetext: Sieghard Beller and Andrea Bender. The limits of counting: numerical cognition between evolution and culture. Science 319, pp. 213–215, 2008. E. Callaway: Animals that count: How numeracy evolved. New Scientist, 23, June 2009. Stanislas Dehaene. The number sense. How the Mind Creates Mathematics. Oxford University Press, New York, 1997. Stanislas Dehaene. Précis of the number sense. Mind and Language 16 (1), pp. 16–36, 2001. Stanislas Dehaene, Single-neuron arithmetic. Science, 297, pp. 1652–1653, 2002 Ivan M. Havel, Zjitřená mysl a kouzelný svět. (in Czech) Vesmír, 87, p. 810, 2008. Ivan M. Havel, Uniqueness of episodic experience. In Kognice 2009. Gaudeamus, Hradec Králové 2009, pp. 5–24. Ivan M. Havel, Vidět počty a čísla. (in Czech) Vesmír, 88, p. 810, 2009. G. Ifrah, Histoire universelle des chiffres (vol. I et II). Robert Laffont, Paris, 1994. William James, The Principles of Psychology. Volume II. Boston 1890. Jonah Lehrer, Inside the savant mind: Tips for thinking from an extraordinary thinker. Scientific American, January 8, 2009. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward M. Hubbard. The phenomenology of synaesthesia. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10 (8), pp. 49–57, 2003. Oliver Sacks, The twins. In: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Pan Books, London, 1985, pp 185–203. Makoto Yamaguchi. On the savant syndrome and prime numbers. Dynamical Psychology (electronic journal), 2009 (www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/yamaguchi.htm). citation: Havel, Ivan M. (2010) Seeing Numbers. [Book Chapter] document_url: http://cogprints.org/6940/1/hjk_havel_y.pdf