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Indigenous people who do not attend school still have a clear understanding of geometric concepts such as circles, rectangles, and parallel lines. (iStockphoto) |
Amazonian hunter-gatherers, who lack written language and have never seen a mathematics textbook, still perform well in geometric tasks. This indicates that geometric ability is inherently present in the brain.
Both adults and children possess clear concepts of the center of a circle and the logical extension of a straight line, regardless of whether they have read these concepts or not.
Professor Stanislas Dehaene from a French university in Paris and his team tested 14 children and 30 adults from the Amazonian group known as Munduruku, comparing their results with those of American children and adults.
“The Munduruku people naturally apply basic geometric concepts such as points, lines, parallels, and angles to detect anomalies in simple images, and they also use distances, angles, and their relationships in geometric maps to locate hidden objects“, the group stated.
“Our results provide evidence of the existence of geometric intuition, even without formal education, exposure to symbols, maps, or a rich geometric vocabulary“.
Geometry is also an ancient field of science, and Dehaene’s team believes it originates from innate abilities.
“Many theorems in geometry—such as two points forming a line and three axes intersecting at a point—are considered self-evident and have never been questioned regarding their logic, principles, or experimental foundations“, the researchers noted.
The Munduruku people have not learned these concepts. “Most children and adults participating in the experiment live in remote, isolated villages and have little to no access to books, rulers, compasses, or maps. Furthermore, the Munduruku language has very few words for arithmetic, mathematics, or spatial concepts, despite many metaphorical terms being used incidentally“.
“The natural understanding of geometric concepts among this small community demonstrates that knowledge of geometry, as well as basic arithmetic, is already present in the human mind“, the researchers concluded.
M.T.
