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In the late 1970s cognitive scientists C. R. Gallistel and Rochel Gelman argued that children learn to count by mapping the number words in their language onto an innate system of preverbal counting that humans share with many other animals.

In his landmark book The Number Sense, first published in 1997, French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene drew attention to the converging evidence for this preverbal system, helping researchers from diverse disciplines—animal cognition, developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, education—realize they were all studying the same thing.

“The preverbal is not just the province of tots but a reservoir of meaning that lies just beneath the surface of our consciousness,” Gabriel says, “if only we stop to listen.”

Tenured faculty, who are protected, lack the skills to reach audiences outside of academia — trapped in the preverbal ivory tower.

The study is “a big step in this new science of what preverbal infants already know about human sociality,” says Alan Fiske, a psychological anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who first hypothesized the link between body fluid exchanges and close human ties.