Our understanding of how the human brain performs mathematical calculations
is far from complete, but in recent years there have been many exciting
breakthroughs by scientists all over the world. Now, in The Number Sense,
Stanislas Dehaene offers a fascinating look at this recent research, in an
enlightening exploration of the mathematical mind. Dehaene begins with the
eye-opening discovery that animals--including rats, pigeons, raccoons, and
chimpanzees--can perform simple mathematical calculations, and that human
infants also have a rudimentary number sense.

Dehaene suggests that this rudimentary number sense is as basic to the way
the brain understands the world as our perception of color or of objects
in space, and, like these other abilities, our number sense is wired into
the brain. These are but a few of the wealth of fascinating observations
contained here. We also discover, for example, that because Chinese names
for numbers are so short, Chinese people can remember up to nine or ten
digits at a time--English-speaking people can only remember seven.
The book also explores the unique abilities of idiot savants and
mathematical geniuses, and we meet people whose minute brain lesions
render their mathematical ability useless.

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