In primates, number neurons in a dedicated parieto-frontal network encode the number of elements in a stimulus. Number neurons in the prefrontal cortex respond in an abstract manner, and their ...

Several species of animal can count, but only humans can do so using abstract number symbols like ‘2’ or ‘4’. Now we know we do so using a different set of brain cells from those we use to recognise ...

Numbers figure pretty high up on the list of what a computer can do well. While humans often struggle to split a restaurant bill, a modern computer can make millions of calculations in a mere second.