This article was originally published with the title “ A Natural Log: Our Innate Sense of Numbers is Logarithmic, Not Linear ” in SA Mind Vol. 19 No. 4 (August 2008), p. 13 doi:10.1038 ...

On a linear scale, we know that four is twice as big as two and eight twice as big as four. This is what a casual observer of earthquake magnitude scales would expect: that an earthquake of 6.0 ...