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How the human brain contends with the strangeness of zero
Zero, which was invented late in history, is special among numbers. New studies are uncovering how the brain creates something out of nothing.
The new studies are the first to reveal what goes on in the brain when a person thinks about zero, and they bring up broader questions about how the mind handles absence — a pursuit that would have pleased Jean-Paul Sartre, the 20th-century existentialist who claimed that “nothingness carries being in its heart.” Then, in the 13th century, a humble traveler by the name of Fibonacci picked up the idea in North Africa and brought it back to medieval Europe, along with the base-10 number system and Indo-Arabic numerals. Barnett and his adviser at University College London, Stephen Fleming, were looking for evidence of the numerical distance effect, a phenomenon that occurs when the brain processes nonzero numbers.
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