Babies Learn to Count Before They Talk

American scientists claim that the ability to understand numbers comes to a person long before the acquisition of speech skills. It has been experimentally proven that infants, not yet able to speak or eat independently, show abilities in mathematics.

Doctors from Duke University in North Carolina conducted an experiment that showed that 7-month-old babies can accurately determine how many people are talking at a given time, writes The Guardian.

Twenty infants were shown two videos of women saying the word "look." One video featured two women, the other three. Some infants were shown recordings of the voices of two women saying the word “look,” others were shown recordings of the voices of three women, and in parallel, on adjacent screens, the babies were simultaneously shown both video clips without sound.

As a result, the majority (60%) of the time spent watching the recordings was spent watching the correct video recording, in which the number of women matched the number of voices in the audio recording.

The results of the experiment, according to the researchers, represent an example of the emergence in humans of mathematical abilities that lie beyond other senses and sensations, the British publication reports.