Why is it so hard to imagine 4D objects
In: Mathematics
The cerebellum has (a neural analog of) purpose-built hardware to efficiently process 3D scenes. When we imagine or manipulate 3D objects, we don’t do this with logic, reason, and faithful analysis. We just deter the entire computation required to the cerebellum, sort of like computers offload graphical computations to the purpose-built graphics card, rather than computing it on the CPU.
This circuitry is not learned. It’s inborn. We didn’t invent it. It evolved. Some parameters of it can be changed, because brains are pretty plastic, but to a very limited degree. In the ancestral environment, you never encountered 4D objects, so there would be no reason to evolve brain areas to compute 4D scenes, so you have to compute it using your general-purpose reasoning facilities, which is going to be way slower if even possible, for pretty much the same reason why an otherwise powerful computer wouldn’t be able to run a modern 3D video game without a graphics card.
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