Life Without Numbers

Scientists at MIT have discovered a living Amazonian language that doesn't include any words to express the idea of individual numbers:

An Amazonian language with only 300 speakers has no word to express the concept of "one" or any other specific number, according to a new study from an MIT team led by professor of brain and cognitive sciences Edward Gibson. The team found that members of the Piraha tribe in remote northwestern Brazil use language to express relative quantities such as "some" and "more," but not precise numbers.

It is often assumed that counting is an innate part of human cognition, said Gibson, "but here is a group that does not count. They could learn, but it's not useful in their culture, so they've never picked it up."

This is fascinating; imagine living so simply that there has never been any need in your life and the lives of everyone you know to have to keep specific count of anything. It seems that this tribe only counts quantities in a relativistic fashion, which suggests to me that they, unlike ourselves, are never really concerned with the things or material possessions that they don't or can't have. Quantifying relativistically says that they're only concerned with what they have at any given moment and are not worrying about how much of anything they've possessed in the past; this would also explain their problems with exact matching tasks requiring a memory component.

On a related note, it seems that the story from this post on a previously undiscovered tribe living in the Amazon was untrue; the tribe is real but the claims that they were unknown until the photos were taken were just lies told by the photographer to call attention to their plight in relation to the logging industry in Brazil. It's still a beautiful picture, nonetheless. His intentions were noble but these things usually come to light and just end up harming the credibility of others working towards the same ends. Anthropology is a fascinating science in and of itself and it should not tolerate any embellishment or false data corrupting it's pursuit of knowledge. At least that's how I feel.