Researchers have discovered that infants have an inborn math sense. They are able to count. You are probably wondering how in the world the scientists could unravel such a thing as the math sense of infants. In the end, the infants are barely capable of moving, and speaking is out of the question.

A little bit of ingenuity was necessary. They were not the first to attempt to test this ability in human infants, and previous studies had failed precisely because the methods were inadequate. But sometimes, the lack of proof for something is not the proof for the inexistence of that something.

Elizabeth Brannon and her colleague from Duke University, Kerry Jordan, have eventually managed to invent a sufficiently ingenious method.

In their study, seven-month-old babies were presented with the voices of two or three women saying "look" and the infants were given two choices: looking at a video image of two women saying the word or at an image of three women saying it. The result was that the babies spent significantly more time looking at the image that matched the number of women talking.

"We conclude that the babies are showing an internal representation of 'two-ness' or 'three-ness' that is separate from sensory modalities and, thus, reflects an abstract internal process," said Brannon.

Previously, they have used this test to study the math sense of monkeys. It was found that grown monkeys also have the same counting ability as the infant babies.

"These results support the idea that there is a shared system between preverbal infants and nonverbal animals for representing numbers," Brannon said.