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One of the explanations for the same neural framework that is developing in so many different brains is that it is an effective solution to a common computational problem. “It’s really exciting because it suggests it’s the best way,” Avarguès-Weber said. Maybe there are physical or other internal limitations that the brain can process zero and many other numbers. “There could be a limited number of ways to build a mechanism for encoding numbers,” Vallortiga said.
However, the fact that crows and monkeys seem to encode an abstract concept like zero in the same way does not mean that it is the only way. “We may have come up with different solutions throughout natural history, during biological evolution, to make similar calculations,” Vallortiga said. Researchers will need to study other animals to find out. On a piece of paper recently published in Cerebral cortexFor example, Vallortigara and colleagues have identified a region of the brain in zebrafish that, although it appears to be related to the number, has not yet tested the ability of animals to evaluate zero.
Bees can also come as a surprise, as they better understand the basis of their abundance. In research published last year, MaBouDi and his colleagues “showed that the bumblebe has a fundamentally different strategy” when four objects are presented, he said. Their findings suggest that the mechanisms behind the abundance of honey used, including zero, may in fact be very different from what has been observed so far.
But perhaps the most basic question about numerical abstraction in the brains of many animals is not how the ability works, but why it exists. Why do animals need to detect specific quantities? Why has evolution repeatedly ensured that animals can understand that four is not less than five, but that “four squares” are conceptually like “four circles”?
Vallortiga believes that one reason may be because arithmetic is very important. “Animals have to do arithmetic all the time. Even simple animals, ”he said. “If you have an abstract representation of the number, it’s very easy to do that.” The abstraction of numerical information allows the brain to perform additional calculations in a much more efficient way.
That also includes zero. If two predators enter an environment and only one leaves, the area remains dangerous. Rugani speculates that in addition to being able to remove an animal in this state, zero should be interpreted as the “result of a pre-made numerical or proto-numerical subtraction” – that the animal may relate to certain environmental conditions. In this case, “every time you get the lowest value, which is zero, the environment is safe,” Rugani said. When searching for food, zeros can map the need to look elsewhere.
Nieder, however, is not convinced. He doesn’t see the need for animals to understand him as much as zero, because it’s usually enough to see him as an absence. “I don’t think animals use zero amounts in their daily lives as a quantity,” he said.
An alternative option is to understand a broader – and broader – understanding of zero from the need for the brain to recognize the visual objects in its environment. In 2019, when Nieder and his colleagues trained the artificial network to recognize objects in images, the ability to discriminate the number of elements it arose spontaneously, apparently as a byproduct of this more general task.
A view of math blocks
According to Nieder, the presence of talents for numerical abstraction in animals indicates that “there is already something established in the brains of these animals that can be the evolutionary basis for us humans to become fully understanding the number zero.”
Although they are just as impressive as the achievements of animals, he stressed that there are critical differences in showing how animals conceptualize quantity and how humans do it. We don’t just understand quantities; we associate them with arbitrary numerical symbols. The set of five objects is not the same as the number 5, Nieder said, and the empty set is not the same as 0.
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