Babies are born with the neural foundations for maths

Brain recordings from newborns reveal the first neural evidence that humans are born with an innate sense of numbers

We are born with an understanding of numbers, which has probably given us a huge evolutionary advantage

Babies are born with an innate sense of numbers, and now, the brain mechanisms behind this ability have been identified for the first time. Within days or even hours of being born, a group of babies could distinguish between four and 12 stimuli, with their brain activity showing how this rudimentary sense of numerosity is in place.

“Extracting numerical information from the environment is just like seeing the world in colour, for most people,” says Brian Butterworth at University College London, who wasn’t involved in the research. By which, he means that having a sense of numbers is part of our essential “start-up” toolkit. Just as you look at a bowl of pears and perceive them as green without having to reason, the brain is also primed to extract an approximate quantity from a scene.

Our brains have their first thoughts unexpectedly early in life

Marco Buiatti at the University of Trento in Italy and his colleagues wanted to examine the brain mechanisms that support our innate sense of numbers, which isn’t acquired through language or culture. They fitted 21 newborns aged between 0 and 3 days old with an EEG cap containing sensors that monitor electrical activity across the brain.

Studying cognition in newborns isn’t easy, says Buiatti. “They open their eyes for a minute or two, and that’s all. It’s complicated and slow, but so rewarding when we get results.”

During moments of alertness, the babies listened to a 90-second recording of a voice repeating sounds, arranged in groups of either four or 12 syllables. “Something like: la, la, la, la,” says Buiatti. The researchers simultaneously showed the babies a visual stimulus containing either four or 12 dots, for up to 50 seconds.

The latest on what’s new in science and why it matters each day.

They found that electrical activity in the babies’ parietotemporal area – which perceives and organises sensory information – decreased when the number of dots matched the number of syllables being spoken, but not when an incongruent number was displayed.

This fits with what is known about the adult brain. When we sense a repeated stimulus, our brain reduces its response to it in an adaptive process known as repetition suppression. This allows the brain to work more efficiently, without having to process every repeated input as if it were new.

When a mismatched number of dots was present