Joonkoo Park is an Associate Professor and Honors Faculty in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at UMass Amherst. He leads the Cognitive and Developmental Neuroscience Lab, focusing on understanding the developmental mechanisms and neurocognitive underpinnings of our knowledge about number and mathematics. Joonkoo’s PhD thesis is titled "Experiential Effects on the Neural Substrates of Visual Word and Number Processing", which he completed in 2011 at the University of Michigan. We talk about numerical processing in the brain, starting with nature vs. nurture, including the learned versus built-in aspects of neural architectures. We talk about the difference between word and number processing, types of numerical thinking, and symbolic vs. non-symbolic numerical processing. - Episode notes: https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/episode37.html - Follow the Thesis Review (@thesisreview) and Sean Welleck (@wellecks) on Twitter - Find out more info about the show at https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/podcast.html - Support The Thesis Review at www.patreon.com/thesisreview or www.buymeacoffee.com/thesisreview