A Mathematical Meme from Janet

In my youth, I collected a bunch of Math Jokes... Such as:

Q: What do you get if you cross an elephant with a zebra.
A: Elephant zebra sin theta.

Q: What do you get if you cross an elephant with a mountain climber.
A: You can't do that. A mountain climber is a scalar.

Douglas:

Groan. Old, awful, geeky math jokes. I love 'em.

Yeah! The ones I always liked the best were the ones that only mathmeticians would get. (Like the above!)

Can't read maps? Wow. I love 'em like a hobbit - can pore endlessly over a topo map of an area I know well. I'm curious, are there other types of visual portrayals that you have trouble with?

jackd:

Lots. In general, I have a lot of trouble with correlating anything I see with the actual spatial relationships. The more abstract it gets, or the faster I need to be able to do something with it, the harder it gets for me.

So with a map, even though I know intellectually how it works, correlating the abstract static scaled 2d image on a map with the real moving 3d world around me is just not something I can really do.

From a slightly different angle, I can't catch a ball if you throw it to me. No way I can figure out where it is while it's moving.

On the other hand, I've got an interestingly bizzare ability to visualize things like extra dimensions, or non-euclidian geometries. Because I'm naturally so disconnected from normal spatial perception, and I have to work so hard to get a spatial understanding of my perceptions, I've been forced to develop the skill, and that turns out to be useful.

Finally, as an interesting aside. I've known about this disability for my whole life, but I never knew where it came from. During grad school, I developed a wierd nervous tick, and the tests they did to make sure it was nothing serious showed a very small patch of very old scar tissue in my brain - right in the area that we use for spatial perception. After getting the results, but before telling me about them, the neurologist asked a whole bunch of questions about things I could and couldn't do. He seemed quite thrilled to actually have a patient with a bit of damage there that he could question.

Mark, thanks for the plug - I should've put in my meme that it would also be great to talk with you about how to ferret out the good alt-med studies from the bad. In the middle of a bunch of garbage, there are also several really interesting and promising approaches.

Amazing story about your learning disability - did the neurologist have any insights as to how the unfortunate scar tissue might have cause a compensatory neural outgrowth elsewhere that might account for your extraordinary math abilities?

I've been checking in ever since Orac first linked to you, so I'm honored to be in your Sb pledge class!

abel:

No problem wrt the plug :-)

And wrt the learning disability... The MRIs and CTs they did didn't show anything except that one little patch of scar tissue, which looks typical of the kind of damage that can happen from oxygen depravation in the birth canal during labor - so it's congenital.

Neither the neuro nor I thought that in general, my math skill is related to that. There's nothing strange about my brain other than that little patch of scar tissue; and there's a lot of mathematical ability in my family on both sides.

My father's a physicist, and since I was good at mathish stuff, he just started teaching me stuff whenever I was interested. I learned about bell curves and standard deviations in third grade! I think that both my enthusiasm for mathematical stuff, and the way that I explain it are products of the way my dad taught me. I think that the greatest amount of credit goes to him.

Thanks, Mark. That is fascinating. Your neurologist's excitement is understandable, since much of what we know about how the brain's organization and function comes from studying people with damage to particular locations.

I know a little boy with some obvious developmental problems, mainly verbal. They found a bit of scar tissue apparently similar to yours, but in a different location in the brain. Before that, I wasn't aware that such scarring happened.

I'm good at maps, atlases & spatial orientation -- but logico-mathematically hopeless(y'know, what follows from a premise & what doesn't)-- while my sister is the reverse(spatially disabled but better than average w/ math & logic.) In fact, I'm so disbabled in mathematics that I cannot really peform elementary arithmetic, needing to embarrassingly count fingers or write things down. But, I'm not sure that I'd consider myself someone w/ just a learning disability; the fact is that I'm borderline retarded(IQ 70-85), was in special academic programs for the very dull, & never completed high school.

No, see, my problem is associated w/ low spearman's g. I'm simply cognitively wanting. In my experience, the reason that I cannot seem to grasp mathematics & logic is that I cannot seem to hold them in working memory long enough to see relationships & sort things out. Now, I don't know how much more intelligent I'd be if my WM were better, but what I am almost sure of is that WM is a salient factor in my stupidity.

--RB

Speaking of math jokes, while I was in grad. school my wife (then fiancee) and I once went to a Halloween party hosted by another one of the grad students (and therefore full of math people). We dressed as a math pun.

We dressed in purple and were carrying bus and light rail schedules. Some people got our costume right away; almost all got it when we pointed out that we were purple and commuting.