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Everyone can be an Architect
Amazonian hunter-gatherers who lack written language and who have never seen a math book score highly on basic tests of geometric concepts, researchers said on Thursday in a study that suggests geometry may be hard-wired into the brain. Reuters
5 Comments
So geometry is hard-wired into the human brain. OK.
Simultaneously this study found that a preference for pretty faces is also hard-wired into the human brain.
Huh.
so everybody's a critic too.
I don't agree with their conclusion that there is "no way they could have learned" the geometrical concepts from their experience in isolated villages. We all live in a euclidean space, light travels in straight lines, (and so do moving objects) and concepts like angles and parallelism can be learnt from moving around. Also, our field of vision is a projective space (in which parallel lines appear to meet), and everyone gets experience of how that relates to three-dimensional space, which is quite a subtle geometrical situation. It prepares you for interpreting geometrical diagrams.
Surely, it is sufficient that geometry is built into the *world*, and not necessary for it also to be hard-wired into the brain.
I had a class once where this topic was covered - the proffesor said that people who rely on navigation of plains, water etc. have a highly developed mathematical part of the brain which is needed to process all the info they take in. Essentially the more civilized a society gets the more it is devolving the human animal. Interesting idea.
Here's a relevant link to a paper by the mathematician Poincare, who writes very clearly about this.
http://acnet.pratt.edu/~arch543p/readings/Poincare.html
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