An understanding of numbers is often viewed as a distinctly human faculty—a hallmark of our intelligence that, along with language, sets us apart from all other animals. Practically every animal that ...
Despite its importance for mathematics, the neuronal basis of the number zero in the human brain was previously unknown. Researchers discovered that individual nerve cells in the medial temporal lobe ...
About 2,500 years ago, Babylonian traders in Mesopotamia impressed two slanted wedges into clay tablets. The shapes represented a placeholder digit, squeezed between others, to distinguish numbers ...
Practically every animal that scientists have studied—insects and cephalopods, amphibians and reptiles, birds and mammals—can distinguish between different numbers of objects in a set or sounds in a ...