920
Lectures Watched
Since January 1, 2014
Since January 1, 2014
- A History of the World since 1300 (67)
- History of Rock, 1970-Present (50)
- A Brief History of Humankind (48)
- The Modern World: Global History since 1760 (35)
- Chinese Thought: Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Science (33)
- The Bible's Prehistory, Purpose, and Political Future (28)
- Introduction aux éthiques philosophiques (27)
- Roman Architecture (25)
- Jesus in Scripture and Tradition (25)
- Sexing the Canvas: Art and Gender (23)
- Descubriendo la pintura europea de 1400 a 1800 (22)
- Introduction aux droits de l'homme (19)
- Buddhism and Modern Psychology (18)
- Calvin: Histoire et réception d'une Réforme (17)
- The Ancient Greeks (16)
- The French Revolution (15)
- À la découverte du théâtre classique français (15)
- Christianisme et philosophie dans l'Antiquité (14)
- Key Constitutional Concepts and Supreme Court Cases (14)
- Letters of the Apostle Paul (14)
- Egiptología (12)
- Western Music History through Performance (10)
- Phenomenology and the Conscious Mind (9)
- Human Evolution: Past and Future (9)
- Greek and Roman Mythology (9)
- Alexander the Great (9)
- The Great War and Modern Philosophy (9)
- The Rise of Superheroes and Their Impact On Pop Culture (9)
- Villes africaines: la planification urbaine (8)
- Masterpieces of World Literature (8)
- Programming Mobile Applications for Android (7)
- Introduction to Psychology (7)
- Fundamentos de la escritura en español (7)
- MongoDB for Node.js Developers (7)
- Pensamiento Científico (7)
- Greeks at War: Homer at Troy (7)
- Lingua e cultura italiana: avanzata (6)
- A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior (6)
- The Emergence of the Modern Middle East (6)
- Reason and Persuasion Through Plato's Dialogues (6)
- Fake News, Facts, and Alternative Facts (6)
- Karl der Große - Pater Europae (6)
- The Rooseveltian Century (6)
- Exploring Beethoven's Piano Sonatas (5)
- Dinosaur Paleobiology (5)
- Understanding Einstein: The Special Theory of Relativity (5)
- L'avenir de la décision : connaître et agir en complexité (5)
- Designing Cities (4)
- Problèmes métaphysiques à l'épreuve de la politique, 1943-1968 (4)
- The Kennedy Half Century (4)
- Introduction to Public Speaking (4)
- Emergence of Life (4)
- War for the Greater Middle East (4)
- Postwar Abstract Painting (3)
- Découvrir l'anthropologie (3)
- Analyzing the Universe (3)
- The Music of the Beatles (3)
- La visione del mondo della Relatività e della Meccanica Quantistica (3)
- Initiation à la programmation en Java (3)
- Formation of the Universe, Solar System, Earth and Life (3)
- History of Rock and Roll, Part One (3)
- La Commedia di Dante (3)
- Devenir entrepreneur du changement (3)
- Moons of Our Solar System (3)
- Orientierung Geschichte (3)
- Paleontology: Early Vertebrate Evolution (3)
- Western Civilization: Ancient and Medieval Europe (3)
- Russian History: from Lenin to Putin (2)
- L'art des structures 1 : Câbles et arcs (2)
- Art History for Artists, Animators and Gamers (2)
- Introduction to Classical Music (2)
- Galaxies and Cosmology (2)
- The Science of Gastronomy (2)
- The Fall and Rise of Jerusalem (2)
- Søren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity (2)
- Philosophy and the Sciences (2)
- Understanding Russians: Contexts of Intercultural Communication (2)
- The European Discovery of China (2)
- Our Earth: Its Climate, History, and Processes (2)
- Découvrir la science politique (2)
- Introduction à la programmation en C++ (2)
- Introduction à la philosophie de Friedrich Nietzsche (2)
- Géopolitique de l'Europe (2)
- Gestion des aires protégées en Afrique (2)
- Lingua e letteratura in italiano (2)
- The Changing Landscape of Ancient Rome (2)
- Materials Science: 10 Things Every Engineer Should Know (2)
- Highlights of Modern Astronomy (2)
- La Philanthropie : Comprendre et Agir (2)
- The Science of Religion (2)
- Advertising and Society (1)
- America Through Foreign Eyes (1)
- Superpowers of the Ancient World: the Near East (1)
- The Art of Poetry (1)
- Bemerkenswerte Menschen (1)
- Big History: From the Big Bang until Today (1)
- Controversies of British Imperialism (1)
- Age of Cathedrals (1)
- Christianity: From Persecuted Faith to Global Religion (200-1650) (1)
- Narratives of Nonviolence in the American Civil Rights Movement (1)
- Constitutional Law - The Structure of Government (1)
- Contagious: How Things Catch On (1)
- Care of Elders with Alzheimer's Disease (1)
- The American South: Its Stories, Music, and Art (1)
- Programming Mobile Services for Android Handheld Systems (1)
- Animal Behaviour (1)
- From the Big Bang to Dark Energy (1)
- Configuring the World (1)
- Introduction to Data Science (1)
- Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society (1)
- The Law of the European Union (1)
- 21st Century American Foreign Policy (1)
- Éléments de Géomatique (1)
- History and Future of Higher Education (1)
- The Age of Jefferson (1)
- The Magna Carta and its Legacy (1)
- A New History for a New China, 1700-2000 (1)
- The New Nordic Diet (1)
- A la recherche du Grand Paris (1)
- What Managers Can Learn from Great Philosophers (1)
- Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1)
- Exercise Physiology: Understanding the Athlete Within (1)
- Physique générale - mécanique (1)
- Subsistence Marketplaces (1)
- Practicing Tolerance in a Religious Society (1)
- Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life (1)
- Andy Warhol (1)
- Web Intelligence and Big Data (1)
- Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics (1)
- Learning How to Learn (1)
- Imagining Other Earths (1)
- Vital Signs: Understanding What the Body Is Telling Us (1)
- Développement durable (1)
- Dinosaur Ecosystems (1)
- The Civil War and Reconstruction (1)
- Shakespeare: On the Page and in Performance (1)
- Introducción a la genética y la evolución (1)
- Poetry in America: Whitman (1)
- Anthropology of Current World Issues (1)
- Escribir para Convencer (1)
- Découvrir le marketing (1)
- Créer et développer une startup technologique (1)
- Frontières en tous genres (1)
- Une introduction à la géographicité (1)
- Gestion et Politique de l'eau (1)
- Theater and Globalization (1)
- Handel’s Messiah and Baroque Oratorio (1)
- Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales (1)
- From Goddard to Apollo: The History of Rockets (1)
- Miracles of Human Language (1)
- Human Origins (1)
- The Computing Technology Inside Your Smartphone (1)
- Intellectual Humility (1)
- Introduction to Italian Opera (1)
- Magic in the Middle Ages (1)
- Making Sense of News (1)
- Introduction to Mathematical Thinking (1)
- Mobilité et urbanisme (1)
- Moral Foundations of Politics (1)
- Mountains 101 (1)
- The Biology of Music (1)
- Oriental Beliefs: Between Reason and Traditions (1)
- In the Night Sky: Orion (1)
- Visualizing Postwar Tokyo (1)
- The Renaissance and Baroque City (1)
- The Rise of China (1)
- Russian History: from Lenin to Putin (1)
- Социокультурные аспекты социальной робототехники (1)
- Science of Exercise (1)
- El Mediterráneo del Renacimiento a la Ilustración (1)
- Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1)
- The World of the String Quartet (1)
- Switzerland in Europe (1)
- The Talmud: A Methodological Introduction (1)
- William Wordsworth: Poetry, People and Place (1)
- Wine Tasting: Sensory Techniques for Wine Analysis (1)
- The World of Wine (1)
Hundreds of free, self-paced university courses available:
my recommendations here
my recommendations here
Peruse my collection of 275
influential people of the past.
influential people of the past.
View My Class Notes via:




Receive My Class Notes via E-Mail:
Contact Me via E-Mail:
edward [at] tanguay.info
Notes on video lecture:
The Human Brain's Outsourcing of Mathematics
Notes taken by Edward Tanguay on October 5, 2013 (go to class or lectures)


Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:
head, limitations, binary, physics, large, brain, fruits, information, clay, foragers, imagined, neurons, mathematical, mathematics, food, sophisticated, geniuses, taxes
throughout history, in order to build a large kingdom or city or modern state, humans needed (1) enough , (2) an order, and (3) techniques for storing large amounts of
up until the agricultural revolution, all information needed was stored in the human
but as societies grew larger and larger, two things happened
1. amounts of necessary information also grew which had to be stored
e.g. a town of 5,000 requires much more information processing than a band of 50 people
2. the human brain was ill-adapted for the kind of information that needed to be stored
monotonous mathematical data, or numbers
had little use for numbers, they needed to more remember shapes, qualities and behavior patterns of thousands of species, and habits and relations of several dozen band members
foragers had little need for numbers, e.g. didn't need to remember the number of on each tree in the forest
if someone like Hammurabi (1792 BC - 1750 BC) wanted to maintain an empire, he needed to collect collect from hundreds of thousands of people, you need to collect data about payments that were made, income and possession of people, about debts and fines, about discounts and exemptions
human brains have a very hard time dealing with this this amount of numbers and mathematical complexity
this mental limitation severely constrained the size of collectives after the agricultural revolution
once societies got to a certain size, humans hadn't developed the mathematical concepts yet to deal with this large number of people
before this, human social networks remained relatively small
Sumerians (4500 BC - 2400 BC)
present-day Southern Iraq
they were the first people to solve this challenge
around 4000 BC, larger kingdoms began to grow
between 3500 BC and 3000 BC some unknown Sumerian invented a new system for storing and processing information outside the brain, and this new system was custom-built to manage large amounts of mathematical data, in this way the Sumerians freed their social order from the of the human brain and opened the way for the appearance of larger cities and kingdoms and empires. This data-processing system that the Sumerians invented was called "writing".
instead of using in the brain, they used material signs of all kinds and shapes.
writing was invented not in order to write poetry or philosophy or history, since all of this could be done in your brain, but one thing you cannot do in your brain is to store and process a large set of mathematical data, this is the original purpose for which writing was created
so if you are looking for the first words of wisdom from our Sumerian ancestors 5000 years ago, you are in for a disappointment
one of the first texts in history on a tablet:
"29,086 measures of barley where received over the course of 37 months"
the first author in history was an accountant
most early writings were: the payment of taxes, the accumulation and ownership of property
after the appearance of writing, we begin to hear history through the voices of its protagonists
as time went by, writing became more was used for other purposes: laws, poetry, philosophy, sacred scriptures
however, even long after the invention of writing, for the most part even today the most basic function of writing is to store administrative information and mathematical data which cannot be stored and processed in the human brain
it was this administrative use of writing that was essential to the functioning of large societies
in fact, the dominant language of the world today is not English or Mandarin, but , the language of numbers: all states, companies, states or institutions, no matter if they primarily speak English, German, Spanish or Mandarin, all use the language of numbers to record and process data
every piece of information that can be translated into numbers is stored, spread and processed with amazing speed and efficiency, a person who wishes to influence the decisions of countries, companies and international organizations, must not only learn to speak English or Mandarin, but more importantly the language of numbers
there are entire fields of knowledge such as , chemistry and engineering that have already lost almost all connection with the spoken human spoken language and are maintained almost solely in mathematical script
e.g. this is the equation for calculating the acceleration of mass i under the influence of gravity according to the theory of relativity
when most people see such an equation, they usually panic and freeze like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle, but this reaction is quite natural and is not a result of lack of intelligence or lack of curiosity, it is simply that, with rare exceptions, human brains are incapable of thinking through concepts like relativity or quantum mechanics.
physicists manage to engage with these ideas and theories by setting aside the traditional human way of thinking and learn instead to think with the help of external data processing systems such as mathematical writing and computers
crucial parts of the thought process in physics take place not in the head of the physicist but on blackboards, or paper, or in computers, because you can't do it in your , it's not built for it
more recently, mathematical writing has given rise to an even more revolutionary writing system, the script which consists of only two signs: zero and one.
scientists are working on intelligent systems which are based on numbers only, and so, the move from the human mind to written number systems to computer systems, to a new kind of intelligence