The human mind is an exceptional machine, although it does have some exceptions. About a million of them, or maybe it’s a zillion? Either way, one known weakness of our brains is that they aren’t designed to grasp huge numbers and other measures of enormity. “Our brains are evolutionarily very old,” one Stanford researcher said on NPR earlier this year, “and we are pushing them to do things that we’ve only just recently conceptualized.” The segment gave some examples of quantities that might be difficult to ponder: the size of the universe and/or the national debt; the length of time that passed between the Big Bang and the dinosaurs; the gap between net worths of a million bucks versus a billion. To all these, I’d add another one: the amount of eyes on gymnast Simone Biles this week as she competes in her third Olympics.
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