Why is it hard for us to conceptualize really big numbers / distances. (1 billion / 1 lightyear)
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1) Experience. The brain works by putting link between existing notions. When you are trying to conceptualise something, what you are really trying to do is trying to understand how this thing relate to the other things you already conceptualised. You have problem conceptualising it because it is different from your everyday life, so you have nothing you are used to that you can compare it to.
2) How the brain deal with scale. The brain “naturally” knows how to count up to 3. After that, that’s more complex. (Which is why Roman numerals stop stacking similar symbols after 3, so at you get VII and not IIIIIII). After that, the brain doesn’t conceptualise well numbers, but it conceptualise approximations of numbers (“this is roughly a dozen”), and the bigger you go, the sketchier those approximation become (and the more they start differing from individuals to individuals) until it the only information remaining is “that’s a very big number, bigger than other big numbers I never really conceptualised, but smaller than bigger numbers that I also never really conceptualised”.
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