10k? 100k? A million?

I am not talking about calculating with numbers, but rather the point where numbers stop being comprehensible, or “no longer mean anything”.

Try visualizing exactly 10000 apples in your mind.

Edit: What I’ve gathered so far from the answers:

Visualizing: <10

  • scarabic@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    Yes I believe there’s an over-emphasis on the visual here. There’s a low limit on how many distinct objects we can perceive visually at once but that’s not entirely the same as what numbers we can grasp and comprehend.

    • Jerkface (any/all)@lemmy.ca
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      4 days ago

      There’s also conflation with the number of “chunks” we can hold in mind at a time, which is often estimated at about seven things. But that doesn’t mean we don’t comprehend what eight is.

      Numbers are DEEP. You can’t just know things about a number, you have to discover them empirically, experimentally. Every number has essentially infinite properties and you can’t know everything about a number, but you get a familiarity with them. Still, even the simplest numbers have the capacity to surprise in the right context.