Numbers are a part of the brain

In this New Yorker article, a neuroscientist named Stanislas Dehaene's experiments are described about how numbers are a distinct part of the brain, and how our ability to deal with numbers may be innate. Dehaene has done many experiments on a range of people from those with brain damage to elite French mathematicians to back up his work.

I found this article to be particularly interesting since I am an engineer, and math is an important part of everything in engineering. Although it is a learned skill, it may also be a structural property of the brain in some people to have better understanding of numbers.