A new way to see numbers

Question

I recently watched a talk by Jacob Barnett in which he showed a way that he could see numbers which is as follows: He also said that the rotation of lines would represent arithmetic operations. Any ideas on how this works? The subject in question is here: https://youtu.be/Uq-FOOQ1TpE?t=79

Answer 1

This is some funny way of telling the story...

Well... you have 5 different colors so it's $2^5 = 32$.

Seriously... this is just some fractal-like structure where each color represents a new step done. At each step you double the number of lines by drawing 2 new cross lines in a new color. The two new lines cross a line from the previous last "generation of lines".

The only "problem" is that the red line represents the number $2$ but that's OK, I guess.

So the red line is generation 1.
The two green lines are generation 2.
The blue ones are generation 3 and so on.

In computer science this is a called a perfect binary tree.