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Cognition, brains and Riemann Researching the unknown

by Joselle DiNunzio Kehoe

Science is much stranger than fiction. It

Submitted by mf344 on July 9, 2013 suggests that our Universe may just be
one of infinitely many which...
Modern neuroscience suggests that number, space and time aren't so much features of the view
outside world but more a result of the brain circuitry we evolved to move around in it. And this
circuitry is all about judging less than/greater than relationships. In the 19th century the
mathematician Bernard Riemann suggested that the mathematical ideas of space, quantity and Dark energy say cheese!
measure should not depend on the outside world, but defined abstractly and in relation to each
other. Joselle DiNunzio Kehoe finds some interesting parallels between these two ideas.

While many see mathematics as the study of patterns, it

is still often expected to be the study of magnitudes Images are now being taken on the
comparisons of the measure of things, in the most world's most powerful digital camera. For
over 500 nights over the next...
general sense. This is what ties modern mathematics to view
its roots in arithmetic, algebra, and geometry. But the
concept of number has evolved since the early days,
now including not only counting numbers, but also all Bluffing and exploitation: An
introduction to poker maths
the real numbers that lie along the number line and
more exotic concepts such as complex numbers.
Mathematicians have also found surprising alternatives
to the geometry laid down by Euclid over 2000 years
ago. This has pushed mathematics towards greater
Is poker a game of psychology and
generality and abstraction. By the late nineteenth cunning rather than strategy? We
century, mathematical concepts no longer relied on our investigate the maths of bluffing.
view
immediate experience. Numbers were no longer
understood as things in themselves. They could only be
understood in their relation to each other. And The lost mathematicians:
geometric ideas were no longer confined to being a Numbers in the (not so) dark
ages
description of the space we experience. Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866)

Mathematics and vision

Because most of us begin learning mathematics when we learn to count, numbers appear to be
the primary idea. And the Euclidean geometry of ancient Greece is still considered by many to A commonly held belief about early
medieval Europe is that academic
be precisely the analysis of spatial relationships. But if we consider that these familiar ideas pursuits, particularly those appertaining...
view
reflect the way we see the world, it is possible to imagine that their meaning relies on a deeper
structure, analogous to the way that an image we see in front of us relies on the brain's
construction of a plethora of visual stimuli. It may be that modern mathematics, while more Biodiversity on the brink
difficult to understand, parallels more rudimentary levels of perception.

By the nineteenth century mathematicians struggled with

the meaning and implications of their ideas and tried to
shore up the foundation of mathematics, fearing perhaps
A team of Australian researchers has
that the weightlessness of the purely abstract could delivered dire news for polar ecosystems,
threaten the integrity of their discipline. They reflected predicting that in some...
view
on, and argued about, the meaning of their work what
it could address, and how. What was a function? Was
"infinity" simply shorthand for an unending process, or
tags
was it something? In 1829 the legendary mathematician
Carl Friedrich Gauss wrote, "mathematics has for its mathematical reality
neuroscience
object all extensive quantities." Other kinds of quantities philosophy
philosophy of mathematics
could be considered "only to the extent that they depend psychology
on the extensive." By extensive quantities Gauss meant
lines that are described by length, surfaces, solid bodies Login to comment or

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Cognition, brains and Riemann | plus.maths.org

and angles, as well as time and number. The non- download PDFs
extensive quantities he allowed included speed, density, Username:
hardness, height, the depth and strength of tones, the
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depth and strength of light, and probability. But he also
Carl Friedrich Gauss (17771855) in a provided an important qualification, "One quantity in Log in

painting by Christian Albrecht Jensen. itself cannot be the object of a mathematical Create new account
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investigation: mathematics considers quantities only in
their relation to one another." Here, quantities and their measures are considered together, and
they can each be thought of as magnitudes.

Gauss's student Bernhard Riemann brought a definitive clarification to the meaning of measure.
He acknowledged in the introduction to his famous lecture On the hypotheses which lie at the
bases of geometry that this was influenced, not only by Gauss, but also by ideas of the
philosopher John Friedrich Herbart, who pioneered early studies of perception and learning.
Herbart's work played a significant role in debates centered on how the mind brings structure
to sensation.

Like cognitive scientists today, Herbart broke down the world of appearances into the subjective
impressions that build it. He rejected the idea that space was the thing that contained the
physical world. For him spatial forms were mental images derived from relationships among
any number of things we experience. They arise in our conception of time (the future being
ahead of us and the past behind us), as well as number, and are applied to all aspects of the
physical world. Herbart accepted that any perceived object could be thought of as a collection
of properties bound together. Many of these properties are produced interactively colour, for
example, happens when light interacts with an object and with the eye. In his collected works,
published in 1850 and 1851, Herbart defined space as, "the symbol of the possible community
of things standing in causal relationship." The eyes and the sense of touch, separately
triggered, then later fused and developed, begin the production of space in our minds. For
Herbart visual images were like hypotheses that are constantly adjusted in response to
feedback from the eye which acts as the measuring device.

Riemann suggested that before we can understand

Gauss' extensive quantities we need a broader
notion of magnitude or measure, one that isn't tied
to space as we perceive it. He described this first
notion as "an antecedent general concept which
admits of different ways of determination." This
general concept would be analogous to colour while
individual shades of the color blue or yellow
correspond to its "different ways of determination."
In Riemann's geometry a space is defined as an
abstract mathematical object, which he called a The surfaces of the Earth and the deflated football
manifold. A manifold does not come equipped with a are both examples of manifolds. If you forget their
specific metric measuring length, area or curvature precise geometry you can consider them
rather it comes with a whole range of possible equivalent as one can be deformed into the other
metrics, again defined as abstract mathematical without tearing. Geometry is an additional
objects that all exhibit the same general structure. structure brought to an object rather than a
(See the article Hidden dimensions for more on defining feature. Image of Earth courtesy NASA.
manifolds and their metrics.) The precise geometric
properties of a space depend on what metric you choose.

In this way Riemann established that geometry is not the analysis of space but, rather, an

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Cognition, brains and Riemann | plus.maths.org

additional structure brought to a space. He distinguished the pure idea of space from the three-
dimensional region that defines the position of objects in our world. Herbart's thinking
foreshadows what studies in cognitive science now show us about how we perceive space and
magnitude it may be that Riemann's mathematical insights reflect them.

Mathematics and modern neuroscience

Mathematicians have always thought of measurement in two ways: geometrically and
arithmetically. These may look like alternative views, but their careful entwinement is crucial to
the abundance of mathematical ideas. Curiously, neuroimaging studies now suggest that the
external experience of space, and the symbolic representation of number activate the same
networks of neurons. In a review article on this interaction, educational neuroscientist Edward
Hubbard from the University of Wisconsin, together with colleagues, hypothesise that
mathematical concepts such as Cartesian coordinates or the complex plane, "although they
appear by cultural invention, were selected as useful mental tools because they fit well in the
pre-existing architecture of our primate cerebral representations". In other words, they line up
with cognitive mechanisms already in place.

Recent findings in cognitive neuroscience are also beginning to unravel how the body perceives
magnitudes through sensory-motor systems. Variations in size, speed, quantity and duration,
are registered in the brain by electro-chemical changes in neurons. The neurons that respond
to these different magnitudes share a common neural network. In a survey of this research,
cognitive neuroscientists Domenica Bueti and Vincent Walsh tell us that the brain does not treat
temporal perception, spatial perception and perceived quantity as different. The neural
processing of size is generalised. They propose that the brain manages numerical systems with
circuitry that is equipped for action related to "more than-less than", "faster-slower", "nearer-
farther", "bigger-smaller", computations of "any kind of stuff in the external world". This neural
activity allows us to successfully reach, grasp, throw or point. Bueti and Walsh argue further
that, "it is on these abilities that discrete numerical abilities hitched an evolutionary ride," given
the primitive need to make these kinds of judgments of space and time. Number then, as a
measure, is not primary what comes first is our need to move accurately.

If the circuitry used to encode different

magnitudes is shared, researchers expected that
the perception of things like duration, size, and
number, even brightness would affect each other.
This has been demonstrated with what are called
interference studies. For example, in one such
study, children were given the information
required to tell that two trains were travelling at
the same speed. If the trains differed in size,
however, they often decided that the larger of two
trains ran faster.

In a recent essay, mathematician Yehuda Rav

chooses the path suggested by Hubbard. He
argues that mathematics grows on the scaffolding
of cognitive mechanisms that have become
genetically fixed with human adaptation.
Mathematics, then, not only reflects cognitive
Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841) structures, but builds on cognitive processes,
extending the range of what we can perceive. It
is, he says, "A singularly rich cognition pool of mankind from which schemes can be drawn for
formulating theories".

Studies in biology and cognitive science point to biological processes that appear to be
mathematically oriented there are cells in our visual system that are sensitive only to vertical
structures, our perception of distance arises from the geometry of binocular vision and our
early learning seems based on calculating probabilities. The body is built to create structure
from sensory data to weave it into the objects we perceive.

Riemann was not engaged in a psychological analysis of our experience of magnitude. But he
was interested in the essence of ideas that were driven by experience and motivated to get
behind the appearance of things in general and of space in particular. He recognised that the
most powerful generality would be found in the purest rendering of the fundamentals. His
observation that any notion of magnitude, or measure, requires a preliminary general concept
on which to rest, lines up with the brain's lack of distinction between temporal, spatial and

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Cognition, brains and Riemann | plus.maths.org

quantitative perception. His careful analysis of what one could mean by magnitude or space
may touch on the very way we perceive the world, using his own hunch for how the pieces
could be teased out of the appearances the brain constructs, and used again to see more.

Perhaps mathematics elaborates on what an organism does to be in its world. As suggested by

biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, "every act of knowing brings forth a
world." The body and the world cannot be separated. Time, after all, is measured in heartbeats.

Further reading
From Kant to Hilbert: A Source Book in the Foundations of Mathematics, William B. Ewald,
2007 Oxford Oxford University
Hermann von Helmholtz and The Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science, edited by
David Cahan 1993 University of California Press
Interactions between number and space in parietal cortex, Edward M. Hubbard, Manuela
Piazza, Philippe Pinel and Stanislas Dehaene, Nature Review Neuroscience Vol. 6 June 2005
The parietal cortex and the representation of time, space, number and other magnitudes,
Domenica Bueti and Vincent Walsh Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society,
Biological Sciences 2009 364, 1831-1840
18 Unconventional Essays on the Nature of Mathematics, edited by Reuben Hersh 2006
Springer, New York
The Tree of Knowledge, H. Maturana and F. Varela, 1987 Shambhala Publications.

About the author

Joselle DiNunzio Kehoe is a writer and Lecturer of
Mathematics at the University of Texas at Dallas. For the
past few years she has been most involved in a book project
that considers a biological view of mathematics. It is this
project that also guides the choice of subjects found in her
blogs at Mathematics Rising.

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Comments

Precise, Efficient communication

Submitted by Anonymous on August 1, 2013.
I have in the past argued that the core of practical
mathematics is precise efficient communication about
real world problems, something that would have
developed most likely before standard systems of
writing. What we know of as mathematics is then an
evolved system of common patterns and a reasoning
system built upon that.

reply

Citations needed?
Submitted by Anonymous on July 12, 2013.
A fascinating article, but it would be nice if links or

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Cognition, brains and Riemann | plus.maths.org

citations could be provided to some of the papers it

mentions.

For instance:

- "In a review article on this interaction, educational

neuroscientist Edward Hubbard from the University of
Wisconsin, together with colleagues, hypothesise that ..."
- "In a survey of this research, cognitive neuroscientists
Domenica Bueti and Vincent Walsh tell us that ..."
- "In a recent essay, mathematician Yehuda Rav chooses
..."
- "As suggested by biologists Humberto Maturana and
Francisco Varela ..."

At all these spots, links are provided to the webpages of

the scientists mentioned, but that's not terribly helpful to
me: I'd like to know exactly what paper is being referred
to.

(In some cases, a direct quote is being given - it seems

like particularly poor form not to give a citation in that
case.)

reply

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