Did you know that babies can count? And did you know that some animals can do simple arithmetic? Whether we possess astounding mathematical talents or the most basic of counting skills, we are all born with numerical intuition. In this book, the author describes some amazing scientific experiments that demonstrate the mental foundations of numerical intuition. If you want to know why you can’t remember how much 7 x 8 makes, or how a cerebral lesion can make you forget 3 - 1, or if you want to figure out the fifth root of 759,375, just follow the author in a series of tortuous mental calculations — and you don’t even have to be a mathematical wizard.

Stanislas Dehaene is a senior research fellow at Inserm and works at the Laboratory of cognitive sciences and of psycholinguistics at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.