In celebration of the holiday season, Sci went looking for something seasonal. But referring constantly to things like how many calories we eat around this time (Sci is no exception) is really a downer. So this season, Sci decided to find out what would happen if you plug the word “christmas” into pubmed.
It turns out there are a lot of people named Christmas.
But Sci ALSO came across this study, which she found to be a really really cool phenomenon of SCIENCE! And so, as her holiday gift to you today, she presents you with this:
Cappelletti et al. “A case of selective impairment of encyclopaedic numerical knowledge or ‘when December 25th is no longer Christmas day, but ’20 + 5′ is still 25′” Cortex, 2006.
One of the things Sci finds interesting about this paper is the idea that the brain distinguishes between two “types” of numbers. Numbers that…are numbers, and numbers that MEAN something.
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