One great blooming, buzzing confusion — that was how William James, a 19th-century psychologist, described how the world would look to a newborn baby. But over the past decades science has revealed that from birth we are armed with the basic building blocks of language, mathematics and music that we need to make sense of what we see and hear.

From a day old, babies have a basic sense of numbers and can distinguish between the concepts one, two, three and many. This was discovered by presenting babies with cards showing dots or playing them drum beats. When a baby is repeatedly shown a card with one dot they get bored and start looking elsewhere, but when they are then presented with a card with two dots their interest is revived.

Babies can also recognise simple musical phrases that they have heard before and they respond differently when spoken to in their native language compared with a foreign language.

Some scientists even think that we are born with an innate sense of beauty. One study showed that newborn infants stared longer when they were shown attractive faces compared with those that were deemed unattractive. The researchers behind the study concluded that the attractive face was simply close to the stereotypical human face that babies are hard-wired to recognise.

More than the scientists themselves, perhaps, the children of neuroscientists are to thank for this sudden upgrade in the intellectual standing of newborns. Many of them have undergone a battery of unusual tests since they were born.

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