According to recent studies, there’s an automatic counting mechanism embedded in the brains of each and every one of us.

You may not think you have a knack for numbers, but scientists say you do.

According to recent studies, our brains are able to automatically perceive quantities before actually counting them.

It’s what allows people to glance at a group of objects and determine how many of them there are.

Researchers learned that the neurons for this task is set up similarly to the specialized networks devoted to deciphering the senses, in contrast to the networks scattered around the brain for cognitive tasks, making it the first time this type of neural pattern has been observed for cognitive function.

By hooking people up to fMRIs they were able to see that one specific section of the brain responds to some quantity stimuli.

When the subjects were shown circles on a screen, ranging from a single sphere to a group of 8 of them, the scientists observed that there was a section of the brain responding accordingly.

For low numbers, the neurons on one side of the area lit up. As the numbers of circles increased, the activity moved to the other side of the region. However the researchers found there are fewer neurons engaged for sensing large quantities, explaining why you can quickly see how many slices of pizza are left but not how many slices of pepperoni.

Thus, its been concluded that the ability to quickly identify smaller quantities may in fact be an intuitive sense.