Baby Numbers

The Teaching Company is the organization that sells video and audio lecture series called "The Great Courses." They're lectures by university professors based on courses that the professors may teach during the year. The lectures are usually altered a little bit to make up for the fact that there's rarely any supplemental reading material and certainly no assignments or exams, but most of the content is the same that they would teach a regular classroom of students.

I'm a customer, finding among the many and varied course offerings something now and again that's worth the cost of the download (The DVD's are often quite pricey). One was Dr. Dennis Kung's How Music and Mathematics Relate, which showed exactly that: The many ways in which things we see in music represent mathematical concepts and relationships. It didn't require expert level knowledge of either field, which is good because I have neither.

But the knowledge that I do have may have come hard-wired into my brain, or at least picked up at a very early age. This excerpt from one of Dr. Kung's lectures in the course describes experiments in which babies were shown to grasp simple arithmetical relationships like addition. Babies as young as five months showed they knew what should happen when they saw a second object added to a first object: they should see two objects. If they didn't, they stared longer trying to figure out what went wrong (I have had the same response when listening to elected officials describe how they will offer free stuff. And sometimes even other responses common to babies, such as shrieking and throwing things).

Dr. Kung also notes that experiments showed babies understood music as more than a string of random noises, well before they had begun to process the idea that certain sounds represent certain things. If they turned their heads one way, they heard one song, but if they turned their heads the other direction they heard a different song, and they were able to exhibit preferences early on. If they spit up, they heard Nickelback, and if they had filled their diapers they heard Kanye West. That last phase of the experiment was canceled when the babies in the tests developed constipation.

The temptation, of course, is to ask why elected officials seem unable to grasp certain things about math that are evident to us at the earliest stages of our development, such as what happens when numbers are added together and what happens when they are subtracted. But they understand it quite well: They take your money and my money, and then add it together and call it their money. It's not math they don't get; it's pronouns.