{"id":208272,"date":"2025-03-10T15:09:51","date_gmt":"2025-03-10T20:09:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/why-zero-could-unlock-how-the-brain-perceives-absence"},"modified":"2025-03-10T15:09:51","modified_gmt":"2025-03-10T20:09:51","slug":"why-zero-could-unlock-how-the-brain-perceives-absence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/why-zero-could-unlock-how-the-brain-perceives-absence","title":{"rendered":"Why zero could unlock how the brain perceives absence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/why-zero-could-unlock-how-the-brain-perceives-absence.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>When I\u2019m birdwatching, I have a particular experience all too frequently. Fellow birders will point to the tree canopy and ask if I can see a bird hidden among the leaves. I scan the treetops with binoculars but, to everyone\u2019s annoyance, I see only the absence of a bird.<\/p>\n<p>Our mental worlds are lively with such experiences of absence, yet it\u2019s a mystery how the mind performs the trick of seeing nothing. How can the brain perceive something when <em>there is no<\/em> <em>something<\/em> to perceive?<\/p>\n<p>For a neuroscientist interested in consciousness, this is an alluring question. Studying the neural basis of \u2018nothing\u2019 does, however, pose obvious challenges. Fortunately, there are other \u2013 more tangible \u2013 kinds of absences that help us get a handle on the hazy issue of nothingness in the brain. That\u2019s why I spent much of my PhD studying how we perceive the number zero.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I\u2019m birdwatching, I have a particular experience all too frequently. Fellow birders will point to the tree canopy and ask if I can see a bird hidden among the leaves. I scan the treetops with binoculars but, to everyone\u2019s annoyance, I see only the absence of a bird. Our mental worlds are lively with [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":599,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-208272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/599"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208272\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}