Is Geometry a Language That Only Humans Know?

Is Geometry a Language That Only Humans Know? Neuroscientists are exploring whether shapes like squares and rectangles — and our ability to recognize them — are part of what makes our species special. Credit...Video by Yoshi Sodeoka • Give this article • • • 142 • By Siobhan Roberts • March 22, 2022Updated 12:21 p.m. ET During a workshop last fall at the Vatican, Stanislas Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist with the Collège de France, gave a presentation chronicling his quest to understand what makes humans — for better or worse — so special. Dr. Dehaene has spent decades probing the evolutionary roots of our mathematical instinct; this was the subject of his 1996 book, “The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics.” Lately, he has zeroed in on a related question: What sorts of thoughts, or computations, are unique to the human brain? Part of the answer, Dr. Dehaene believes, might be our seemingly innate intuitions about geometry. Organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Vatican workshop addressed the subject “Symbols, Myths and Religious Sense in Humans Since the First” — that is, since the first humans emerged a couple of million years back. Dr. Dehaene began his slide show with a collage of photographs showing symbols engraved in rock — scythes, axes, animals, gods, suns, stars, spirals, zigzags, parallel lines, dots. Some of the photos he took during a trip to the Valley of Marvels in southern France. These engravings are thought to date back to the Bronze Age, from roughly 3,300 B.C. to 1,200 B.C.; others were 70,000 and 540,000 years old. He also showed a photo of a “biface” stone implement — spherical at one end, triangular at the other — and he noted that humans sculpted similar tools 1.8 million years ago. For Dr. Dehaene, it is the inclination to imagine — a triangle, the laws of physics, the square root of negative 1 — that captures the essence of being human. “The argument I made in the Vatican is that the same ability is at the heart of our capacity to imagine religion,” he recalled recently. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story He acknowledged, with a laugh, that it is no small leap from imagining a triangle to devising religion. (His own intellectual trajectory entailed a degree in mathematics and a master’s in computer science before becoming a neuroscientist). Nevertheless, he said, “This is what we have to explain: Suddenly there was an explosion of new ideas with the human species.”