Is "THREE" more than "three"? Brain Research is Looking for Answers - How do we process numbers? A new project from the Austrian Science Fund – FWF hopes to find the complex answer to this seemingly simple question by building on the recent findings of a team from Innsbruck. These show that while children and adults are equally good at processing numbers, they actually use different regions of the brain to do so. The new project is now comparing the cerebral activity of children with and without numeracy deficits in order to arrive at a deeper knowledge of children’s numerical and spatial magnitude processing. What’s more, 15 Smarties or 5 toy cars? Even if we restrict the concept of "more" to the number of objects, the brain requires a considerable degree of abstraction to answer this question, as the spatial dimensions of the objects must be isolated from their number. Though 15 Smarties may take up less space there are still "more" of them than 5 toy cars.