10k? 100k? A million?

I am not talking about calculating with numbers, but rather the point where numbers stop being comprehensible, or “no longer mean anything”.

Try visualizing exactly 10000 apples in your mind.

Edit: What I’ve gathered so far from the answers:

Visualizing: <10

  • Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org
    11·
    9 days ago

    Try visualizing exactly 10000 apples in your mind.

    Impossible. The first apple inside my head would have killed me already.

    I can visualize 1 apple im my mouth.

    I can visualize 2 apples im my mouth, but with some struggle.

    I cannot visualize 10 or 100 or 10,000 apples im my mouth.

    So my answer is 2. Every human can grasp that number. Above 2, not everybody can.

    • Asafum@feddit.nl
      9·
      9 days ago

      “One… Two… Umm … Many … One many… Two many… Many many…”

      We are all Detritus lol

    • kinsnik@lemmy.world
      3·
      8 days ago

      I don’t think grasping and visualizing are the same. I am sure you can grasp the concept of 3. Like 3 cars waiting on a light, or 3 slices of pizza.

      If the limit was visualizing, the answer would be zero, since some folks can’t visualize at all.

      • Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org
        2·
        8 days ago

        Always a pleasure when people explain my texts to me. Even more so when I was deliberately unprecise, or not so serious at all 😉

    • froh42@lemmy.world
      2·
      7 days ago

      I am bordering on aphantasia, i can’t visualize an apple at all, just as an abstract drawing.

      I can visualize numbers and graphs, for example 1-6 are easy with the symbols of a dice, 7 like six with a dot in the middle, 8 two rows of fours and 9 as a three by threw grid.

      The thing is, I never visualize things literally, it’s always abstract symbols - and understanding “more” requires better symbols.

      Decimal system is also just a symbol, I can easily keep numbers in my mind up to six or seven digits.

      Bigger, I have a bit of trouble with the scientific notation - I don’t have concepts for numbers beyond 10^9, even these rather are a thousand million for me, conceptually. And speaking English right now doesn’t help, as I’m from a big ladder country while the US is small ladder: 1 Billion (German) = 1000 billion (US).

      “Hardcoded” numbers in the brain go to 4 or 5 or so, everything else is abstractions. piled on abstractions and how used you are to handling these.

      In computers you deal with bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes. I visualize the difference between 1kb and 1Tb, as I have experienced each of these stages. (My first computer had 1kb, the second one 64… it was growing exponentially for years)