Name: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35...
Uploaded: 2020-03-28T09:55:06.000Z
Duration: 9 min 18 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

To-infinitive

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. Let's take a moment to recognize

The superlative

Mike Smith holds the world record for the largest number

But the world record for the largest number

from Birmingham, Alabama. In order to set the record,

Harper never left his apartment. He got regular sleep,

but from the moment he woke up in the morning until the moment he went to bed

Harper did nothing but count. He streamed the entire process

over the Internet and raised money for charity while doing it,

all day, every day, he finally reached the world record -

1 million. Now, a million might not sound

like a lot, but think of this way. One thousand

that's more than 31 years. There's no full video online of Harper counting all

but you can watch John Harchick count all the way to 100,000, if you have

John also has some other channels. One involves more than 300 videos

of himself eating carrots. Another, more than 3,000 videos of himself

literally have no views. They are as lonely as a video on YouTube can get.

A great way to find such videos is a website made

by Jon van der Kruisen. This website auto plays videos on YouTube that no one

as well as Mike, the one breath counter counted like this.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and so on. But that's not the only way to count.

And it doesn't seem to be the one we're born with. Additive counting is the one

to the last. But what if we multiply it by a number instead?

Well, that kind of counting is logarithmic, from

"arithmos" meaning number and "logos" meaning ratio,

proportion. On this scale, similar distances

are similar proportions. One is a third of three

and three is a third of nine. Four is a third of 12 and so on.

Our brains perceive the world around us on a logarithmic scale.

It's believed that almost all of our senses are multiplicative,

not additive. For example, how loud we perceive a sound to be.

Two boomboxes playing at the same volume don't sound

twice as loud as one. In order to make a sound that is perceived as being

about twice as loud as one boombox, you actually need

ten times as many, so 10. And to double that loudness,

you would need a hundred. And to double that loudness,

you would need a thousand. Having an intuitive sense

of logarithmic scales built into your brain is probably an advantage when it comes

matters more than absolute value. For example,

"is there one lion hiding over there in the shadows

than "are there ninety six lions about to attack us

or ninety seven?" Sure, in both cases I'm just talking about one extra lion,

but adding one lion to one lion, doubles the threat.

Adding one lion to 96, well, that's basically nothing.

Logarithmic thinking and feeling may explain why life

seems to speed-up as we get older. It seems like I was a child

for ever. And in college, in my early 20's, just whizzed by.

And logarithmically, that makes sense, because each new year that I live

is the smaller fraction of all the other years I've already lived.

When you turn 2 years old, the last year of your life is

half your life. But when you turn 81, that last year that you've lived,

well, that's just a tiny part of the other 80 that you know.

Logarithmic thinking isn't always helpful,

especially in scenarios where proportion doesn't logically matter

One of my favorite examples is the psychophysics of price

paradox. This is something almost all of us do.

Researchers found consistently that people are willing to put a lot of

5 dollars of a 10 dollar purchase, but they won't put much effort into

It's 5 dollars saved either way, but our natural obsession with proportion

leads us astray. Take a look at these pictures.

Can you tell how many objects are in each of them? You probably can.

It's like really easy. You can tell if there are

zero, one, two, three or four objects in a photo

without even needing to count. How are you doing that?

Psychologists call it "subitizing." We can, intuitively,

at a glance, determine whether there are about four or fewer objects in a photo.

This has been part of human culture for a very long time

and it may be the reason so many tally systems from all over the world all

wind up having to do something different when counting the number five.

When estimating or comparing amounts above 4,

the brain uses what's known as an approximate number system.

It's a psychological ability we have. It's about 15 percent

accurate. It two amounts are at least 15 percent different, we can tell.

If you wanna test the accuracy of your approximate number system

Panamath has a pretty good test. We often take

linear additive counting for granted, but it's not granted to us.

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1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35...

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