And as for writing, don't get me started. Most often, the process of writing is not a laborious business of transcription, but a process of thinking itself. I'm not about to outsource my thinking to a machine.

There is still so much we don’t know about the brain’s ability to deal with absence, and we hope this study goes some way towards revealing the different ways we are able to represent ‘nothing.’

These findings help extend previous distinctions between perception and cognition to the case of absences and, at least in adult humans, suggest that abstract concepts of absence are not rooted in more primitive representations of sensory absence.

Moreover, this was in spite of low-level visual similarities between perceptual and non-symbolic absences, which could otherwise drive spurious generalisation between the two domains.

We built on these results to study how numerical and perceptual absences related to each other – finding surprisingly strong evidence for distinct neural representations of different types of absence.

First of all, we replicated our previous findings that representations of absence are shared across both symbolic and non-symbolic numerical tasks.

To characterise the brain’s representation of various absences, we had participants perform three different tasks in the MEG scanner, each involving absence from a different domain: perceptual, non-symbolic numerosity, and symbolic number.

Likewise, how we are able to conceptualise absence – e.g., as the number zero – is not straightforward either. How did we create something out of nothing?

But how the brain deals with absences is not currently known. Sensory systems are typically geared to detect the presence of objects in our environment, so how we are able to perceive absences is not a straightforward question.

What do the music of Miles Davis, the paintings of Edward Hopper, and the equations of Isaac Newton have in common? They all rely – in different ways – on absences.

Hey Will, thanks for the tip. We checked again and everything looks ok to us. The data/code are up on OSF though so feel free to take a look and email me if you find anything!

#neuroskyence #PsychSciSky

All data and code for the paper can be found here: osf.io/g7tjh/.

We would be very interested if other people found similar patterns in their data!