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Abstraction as a Natural Process of Mental Compression
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Gray, Eddie; Tall, David – Mathematics Education Research Journal, 2007
This paper considers mathematical abstraction as arising through a natural mechanism of the biological brain in which complicated phenomena are compressed into thinkable concepts. The neurons in the brain continually fire in parallel and the brain copes with the saturation of information by the simple expedient of suppressing irrelevant data and…
Descriptors: Symbols (Mathematics), Brain, Arithmetic, Mathematics Instruction