Counting

More counting in the margins of a talk at the Royal Institution last night, to be reported substantively in due course.

Usual drill, with me sat in the right hand part of the middle block, maybe two thirds of the way up. The idea being to count the people in the left hand block. A block which is a trapezium in shape, with thin edge at the bottom. The two sides clearly marked by stairways, the back clearly marked by the back wall. So easy enough for the brain to know whether any given person qualifies or not.

Also usual drill, in that I counted the numbers in the dozen or so rows a few times, working up, until I judged that I knew them well enough.

Then, still working up, I compute the cumulative count, saying to myself, for example, '41 plus 11 makes 52', where 41 was the cumulative count so far and 11 was the count for the next row. Articulating the sum in this way seemed to hold the current cumulative count in working memory for long enough for me to recover the count for the next row, pretty much lodged in memory somewhere by the first part of the operation, and to do the necessary sum. At least partly a question of getting into the rhythm of it.

It did require concentration for the minute or so it took to complete the count, but it did seem to work, rapidly converging on a stable count of 74 or 75. Only slightly confused by the arrival of a few late comers, it getting quite near to the time for the off.

Don't know why working up should work better than working down. But I do know that counting this number of people placed randomly, rather than in orderly rows, would be more or less impossible, at least for me. Maybe one needs to be autistic to be able to do that, the sort of person that goes in for counting the pebbles on the beach.

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