You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey Sure Wavers, today's episode is a special one for us because it's in celebration of our

thousandth episode, which, wow, I think we look great for a thousand. But how do you even process

a thousand of something? This milestone got us thinking about big numbers and

how it's hard to wrap your brain around

them sometimes. So we called an educational neuroscientist. My name is

Elizabeth Tumarian from Stanford University. One of the things she studies is how the brain processes numbers or doesn't.

Our human brains are pretty bad at comprehending large numbers and the same is true actually

for really small numbers too.

And needing to think about a nanosecond or a billion of something is a pretty new thing for humans.

Our brains are evolutionarily very old and we are pushing them to do things that we've only just recently

conceptualized. Things like the size of our universe or the national debt or

understanding how many seconds are in a year.

For example, think about a piece of ticker tape representing the amount of time between us

and when the Big Bang happened about 13.7 billion years ago.

Where would you place the existence of the dinosaurs on that tape?

Our intuitive sense would be like, oh, we think about dinosaurs as being a really long time

away, and so we might put that really close to the big bang.

Or maybe somewhere near the middle of the tape.

When in reality that's not right at all.

Like dinosaurs are really close to us in like I think it's like in the last

you know a couple inches of a multi yard thing of ticker tape.

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