
A man who can't see numbers between 2 and 9 - kharak
https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/man-couldnt-see-numbers/
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kharak
I find this fascinating. Without a degree in neurology, I like to imagine what
is roughly happening in a coder fashion.

1\. RFS (the person with the condition) perceives a digit, 8 for instance.
Touching or seeing doesn't matter (article says nothing about hearing).
Perception works fine, meaning that the input feed is still working. 2\.
Something in RFS brain inserts the perceived shape information into some sort
of hash function, where the result is then used as key for an index map. The
resulting value is the position of the neurons associated with the digit 8.
3\. The neurons encoding 8 are still there, but their storage is corrupted (do
we know how the brain / neurons store information?). Dutifully, those neurons
forward the corrupted data to the mental processing unit. 4\. The mental
processing unit receives the corrupted data, runs an interpreter, tries to
integrate the data with its conscious reality construct and comes to the
following conclusion: This is some form of spaghetti. The spaghetti is never
the same, as it's always influenced by the conscious reality construct.

If those neurons would have been destroyed, RFS might have relearned those
digits. But as the neurons remain, their data stays and can't be updated.
Although I still wonder, why exactly they can't be updated and how updating
normally works. Maybe the data corruption makes the normal update process
physically impossible. Or RFS brain doesn't register the corrupted data as
faulty.

Anyway, does anyone know more about this case or the neurology behind it?

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sawaruna
In that second video in the article, he's holding a cutout of the number 9. I
wonder if he put it on the paper and traced the outline, including the inner
circles, what he'd see. Would the lines be accurate until the pen strokes
connected to make an '8' and the result would suddenly scramble?

Also, is it the shape itself or the fact that the shape is a number? In other
words, if you put a random cutout of the number 8 on a tree branch rather than
have him look at a sequence of numbers, would that make any difference?

~~~
kharak
My guess is, that the moment his brain matches the perceived shape to the
stored form of 8, it scrambles. That´s why he can feel the individual forms,
like the circles inside the 8, just fine. Also why he can see the horizontal 8
as a mask. A mask is a distinct object, although similar in shape. Makes me
wonder, if we have a stored shape for every object we've ever seen.

