The human mind is an exceptional machine, although it does have some exceptions.
About a million of them, or maybe it’s a zillion? Either way, one known weakness of
our brains is that they aren’t designed to grasp huge numbers and other measures
of enormity. “Our brains are evolutionarily very old,” one Stanford researcher said
on NPR earlier this year, “and we are pushing them to do things that we‘ve only just
recently conceptualized.” The segment gave some examples of quantities that
might be difficult to ponder: the size of the universe and/or the national debt; the
length of time that passed between the Big Bang and the dinosaurs; the gap
between net worths of a million bucks versus a billion. To all these, I’d add another
one: the amount of eyes on gymnast Simone Biles this week as she competes in her
third Olympics.

The American star arrived at the 2024 Paris Games eager to complete a comeback
that began in the aftermath of a distressing performance at the Tokyo Olympics in
2021. In those Games, Biles stumbled off the vault and eventually withdrew from
much of the competition following descriptions of her being “lost in the air” and
developing something called “the twisties.” It was less than two years ago that Biles
had stepped so far away from competition that she occasionally had to post on
social media that she hadn’t technically retired. But in the summer of 2023, she

The human mind is an exceptional machine, although it does have some exceptions.
About a million of them, or maybe it’s a zillion? Either way, one known weakness of
our brains is that they aren’t designed to grasp huge numbers and other measures
of enormity. “Our brains are evolutionarily very old,” one Stanford researcher said
on NPR earlier this year, “and we are pushing them to do things that we‘ve only just
recently conceptualized.” The segment gave some examples of quantities that
might be difficult to ponder: the size of the universe and/or the national debt; the
length of time that passed between the Big Bang and the dinosaurs; the gap
between net worths of a million bucks versus a billion. To all these, I’d add another
one: the amount of eyes on gymnast Simone Biles this week as she competes in her
third Olympics.

The American star arrived at the 2024 Paris Games eager to complete a comeback
that began in the aftermath of a distressing performance at the Tokyo Olympics in
2021. In those Games, Biles stumbled off the vault and eventually withdrew from
much of the competition following descriptions of her being “lost in the air” and
developing something called “the twisties.” It was less than two years ago that Biles
had stepped so far away from competition that she occasionally had to post on
social media that she hadn’t technically retired. But in the summer of 2023, she