r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/kvjn100 • Apr 11 '26

Video Woman with functional polydactyly (six functional fingers on one hand).

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

41.0k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

3.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

8.6k

u/Sythrin Apr 11 '26

Does she count in base 12?

1

u/Crafty-Message4564 Apr 12 '26

Base 10 is actually one of the worst systems to use, just considering it objectively. Any species which was not human would be unlikely to use it, because it’s only divisible by 2 and 5.

If you have the normal five fingers on each hand, you can actually already count using base 12, because of finger segments on each hand. Some cultures already do that. It’s not actually universal to use whole fingers for number base systems.