A new study has found that there is a set of cells in the top rear of the brain that apparently keeps score. A team of Duke University researchers report in PLoS Biology that they discovered a pocket of "accumulator neurons" in the region of a monkey brain called the parietal cortex that appears to integrate and sum up the total quantity of individual items. Researchers focused on this region of the brain because previous human studies indicated that damage to the intraparietal portion of the brain impairs numerical processing. The researchers speculate that the information in these intraparietal neurons is then passed to another population of cells in the prefrontal cortex, which then fine-tunes the calculation into an exact value.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Counting is done in the parietal part of the brain
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