Stanislas Dehaene (born May 12, 1965) is a French author and
cognitive neuroscientist whose research centers on a number of topics, including
numerical cognition
Numerical cognition is a subdiscipline of cognitive science that studies the cognitive, developmental and neural bases of numbers and mathematics. As with many cognitive science endeavors, this is a highly interdisciplinary topic, and includes re ...
, the neural basis of
reading
Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of symbols, often specifically those of a written language, by means of Visual perception, sight or Somatosensory system, touch.
For educators and researchers, reading is a multifacete ...
and the
neural correlate
The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) are the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms sufficient for the occurrence of the mental states to which they are related. Neuroscientists use empirical approaches to discover neural correla ...
s of
consciousness
Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of a state or object, either internal to oneself or in one's external environment. However, its nature has led to millennia of analyses, explanations, and debate among philosophers, scientists, an ...
. As of 2017, he is a professor at the
Collège de France
The (), formerly known as the or as the ''Collège impérial'' founded in 1530 by François I, is a higher education and research establishment () in France. It is located in Paris near La Sorbonne. The has been considered to be France's most ...
and, since 1989, the director of
INSERM Unit 562, "Cognitive Neuroimaging".
Dehaene was one of ten people to be awarded the
James S. McDonnell Foundation Centennial Fellowship in 1999 for his work on the "Cognitive Neuroscience of Numeracy". In 2003, together with Denis Le Bihan, Dehaene was awarded the
Grand Prix scientifique de la Fondation Louis D. from the
Institut de France
The ; ) is a French learned society, grouping five , including the . It was established in 1795 at the direction of the National Convention. Located on the Quai de Conti in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, the institute manages approximately ...
. He was elected to the
American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society (APS) is an American scholarly organization and learned society founded in 1743 in Philadelphia that promotes knowledge in the humanities and natural sciences through research, professional meetings, publicat ...
in 2010. In 2014, together with
Giacomo Rizzolatti and
Trevor Robbins, he was awarded
the Brain Prize.
Dehaene is an associate editor of the journal ''Cognition'', and a member of the editorial board of several other journals, including ''
NeuroImage'', ''
PLoS Biology
''PLOS Biology'' is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering all aspects of biology. Publication began on October 13, 2003. It is the first journal published by the Public Library of Science. The editor-in-chief is Nonia Pariente.
In ...
'', ''Developmental Science'', and ''Neuroscience of Consciousness''.
Early life and education
Dehaene studied mathematics at the
École Normale Supérieure
École or Ecole may refer to:
* an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by Secondary education in France, secondary education establishments (collège and lycée)
* École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing i ...
in Paris from 1984 to 1989.
He obtained his master's degree in Applied mathematics and computer science in 1985 from the
University of Paris VI.
He turned to neuroscience and psychology after reading
Jean-Pierre Changeux's book, ''L'Homme neuronal'' (''Neuronal Man: The Biology of The Mind'').
Dehaene began to collaborate on computational neuronal models of human cognition, including working memory and task control, collaborations which continue to the present day.
Dehaene completed his PhD in Experimental Psychology in 1989 with
Jacques Mehler
Jacques Mehler (17 August 1936 – 11 February 2020) was a cognitive psychologist specializing in language acquisition.
Education
Mehler studied chemistry and obtained his ''Licenciatura en Ciencias Quimicas'' at the Universidad de Buenos Aires ...
at the
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris.
Career
After receiving his doctorate, Dehaene became a research scientist at
INSERM in the Cognitive Sciences and Psycholinguistics Laboratory (''Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique'') directed by Mehler.
He spent two years, from 1992 to 1994, as a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences, with
Michael Posner at the
University of Oregon
The University of Oregon (UO, U of O or Oregon) is a Public university, public research university in Eugene, Oregon, United States. Founded in 1876, the university is organized into nine colleges and schools and offers 420 undergraduate and gra ...
.
Dehaene returned to France in 1997 to serve as Research Director at INSERM (French National Institute of Health and Medical Research) through 2005. He subsequently began his own research group, which today numbers nearly 30 graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and researchers.
In 2005, he was elected to the newly created Chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology at the
Collège de France
The (), formerly known as the or as the ''Collège impérial'' founded in 1530 by François I, is a higher education and research establishment () in France. It is located in Paris near La Sorbonne. The has been considered to be France's most ...
.
Work
Numerical cognition
Dehaene is best known for his work on
numerical cognition
Numerical cognition is a subdiscipline of cognitive science that studies the cognitive, developmental and neural bases of numbers and mathematics. As with many cognitive science endeavors, this is a highly interdisciplinary topic, and includes re ...
, a discipline which he popularized and synthesized with the publication of his 1997 book, ''The Number Sense'' (''La Bosse des maths'') which won the for best French language general-audience scientific book. He began his studies of numerical cognition with Jacques Mehler, examining the cross-linguistic frequency of number words, whether numbers were understood in an analog or compositional manner, and the connection between numbers and space (the "SNARC effect"). With Changeux, he then developed a computational model of numerical abilities, which predicted log-gaussian tuning functions for number neurons, a finding which has now been elegantly confirmed with single-unit physiology
With long-time collaborator Laurent Cohen, a neurologist at the
Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, Dehaene also identified patients with lesions in different regions of the
parietal lobe
The parietal lobe is one of the four Lobes of the brain, major lobes of the cerebral cortex in the brain of mammals. The parietal lobe is positioned above the temporal lobe and behind the frontal lobe and central sulcus.
The parietal lobe integra ...
with impaired multiplication, but preserved subtraction (associated with lesions of the
inferior parietal lobule
The inferior parietal lobule (subparietal district) lies below the horizontal portion of the intraparietal sulcus, and behind the lower part of the postcentral sulcus. Also known as Geschwind's territory after Norman Geschwind, an American neu ...
) and others with impaired subtraction, but preserved multiplication (associated with lesions to the intraparietal sulcus). This
double dissociation suggested that different neural substrates for overlearned, linguistically mediated calculations, like multiplication, are mediated by inferior parietal regions, while on-line computations, like subtraction are mediated by the intraparietal sulcus. Shortly thereafter, Dehaene began
EEG and
functional neuroimaging
Functional neuroimaging is the use of neuroimaging technology to measure an aspect of brain function, often with a view to understanding the relationship between activity in certain brain areas and specific mental functions. It is primarily used a ...
studies of these capacities, showing that parietal and frontal regions were specifically involved in mathematical cognition, including the dissociation between subtraction and multiplication observed in his previous patient studies.
Together with
Pierre Pica, and
Elizabeth Spelke, Stanislas Dehaene has studied the numeracy and numeral expressions of the
Mundurucu
The Munduruku, also known as Mundurucu or Wuy Jugu, are an indigenous people of Brazil living in the Amazon River basin. Some Munduruku communities are part of the Coatá-Laranjal Indigenous Land. They had an estimated population in 2014 of 13,7 ...
(an indigenous tribe living in Para,
Brazil
Brazil, officially the Federative Republic of Brazil, is the largest country in South America. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, fifth-largest country by area and the List of countries and dependencies by population ...
).
Consciousness
Dehaene subsequently turned his attention to work on the
neural correlates of consciousness
The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) are the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms sufficient for the occurrence of the mental states to which they are related. Neuroscientists use empirical approaches to discover neural correla ...
, leading to numerous scientific articles, an edited book, "The Cognitive Neuroscience of
Consciousness
Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of a state or object, either internal to oneself or in one's external environment. However, its nature has led to millennia of analyses, explanations, and debate among philosophers, scientists, an ...
" and is the Past President of the
Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. Dehaene, together with Jean-Pierre Changeux, has developed computational models of consciousness, based on
Bernard Baars
Bernard J. Baars (born 1946 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands) is a former Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, US. He is currently an Affiliated Fellow there.
He is best known as the originator of ...
's
Global Workspace Theory, which suggest that only one piece of information can gain access to a "global neuronal workspace".
To explore the neural basis of this global neuronal workspace, he has conducted
functional neuroimaging
Functional neuroimaging is the use of neuroimaging technology to measure an aspect of brain function, often with a view to understanding the relationship between activity in certain brain areas and specific mental functions. It is primarily used a ...
experiments of masking and the
attentional blink
Attentional blink (AB) is a psychological effect where people struggle to notice a second visual target in a rapid sequence if it appears 200 to 500 milliseconds after the first and is followed by distractions. For instance, in a fast stream of le ...
, which show that information that reaches conscious awareness leads to increased activation in a network of
parietal and
frontal regions.
However, some of his work on this subject has been called into question due to a methodological flaw in the "standard reasoning of unconscious priming".
Neural basis of reading
In addition, Dehaene has used brain imaging to study language processing in monolingual and bilingual subjects, and in collaboration with Laurent Cohen, the neural basis of reading. Dehaene and Cohen initially focused on the role of
ventral stream
The two-streams hypothesis is a model of the neural processing of vision as well as hearing. The hypothesis, given its initial characterisation in a paper by David Milner and Melvyn A. Goodale in 1992, argues that humans possess two distinct vis ...
regions in visual word recognition, and in particular the role of the
left
Left may refer to:
Music
* ''Left'' (Hope of the States album), 2006
* ''Left'' (Monkey House album), 2016
* ''Left'' (Helmet album), 2023
* "Left", a song by Nickelback from the album ''Curb'', 1996
Direction
* Left (direction), the relativ ...
inferior temporal cortex
The inferior temporal gyrus is one of three gyri of the temporal lobe and is located below the middle temporal gyrus, connected behind with the inferior occipital gyrus; it also extends around the infero-lateral border on to the inferior surface ...
for reading written words. They identified a region they called the "visual word form area" (VWFA) that was consistently activated during reading, and also found that when this region was
surgically removed to treat patients with intractable
epilepsy
Epilepsy is a group of Non-communicable disease, non-communicable Neurological disorder, neurological disorders characterized by a tendency for recurrent, unprovoked Seizure, seizures. A seizure is a sudden burst of abnormal electrical activit ...
, reading abilities were severely impaired.
Dehaene, Cohen and colleagues have subsequently demonstrated that, rather than being a single area, the VWFA is the highest stage in a hierarchy of visual feature extraction for letter and word recognition.
More recently, they have turned their attention to how learning to read may depend on a process of "
neuronal recycling" that causes brain circuits originally evolved for object recognition to become tuned to recognize frequent letters, pairs of letters and words, and have tested these ideas examining brain responses in a group of adults who did not learn to read due to social and cultural constraints.
Bibliography
As editor
* Dehaene, S. (Ed.) ''Numerical Cognition.'' Oxford, Blackwell. .
* Dehaene, S. (Ed.) ''Le Cerveau en action: l'imagerie cérébrale en psychologie cognitive.'' Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997. .
* Dehaene, S. (Ed.) ''The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness.'' MIT Press, 2001. .
* Dehaene, S. Duhamel, J.R., Hauser, M. and Rizzolatti, G. (Ed.) ''From Monkey Brain to Human Brain.'' Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. .
As author
* ''La Bosse des maths''. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1997. .
* ''The number sense.'' New York: Oxford University Press, 1997; Cambridge (UK): Penguin press, 1997. .
* ''Vers une science de la vie mentale.'' Paris: Fayard, 2007. (Inaugural Lecture at the Collège de France). .
* ''Les neurones de la lecture.'' Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007. .
* ''Reading in the brain.'' New York: Penguin, 2009. .
* ''
Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts.'' Viking Adult, 2014. .
* ''Le Code de la conscience'', Paris: Odile Jacob, 2014,
* ''How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now''. Viking, 2020. .
Personal life
Dehaene is married to
Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz.
Together they have three sons.
References
External links
Laboratory Websiteat
Edge.org
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dehaene, Stanislas
1965 births
Living people
French neuroscientists
Mathematical cognition researchers
Academic staff of the Collège de France
Knights of the Legion of Honour
Members of the French Academy of Sciences
Members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences
Members of the American Philosophical Society
École Normale Supérieure alumni
Winners of the Heineken Prize
Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society
Foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences
French consciousness researchers and theorists
Corresponding fellows of the British Academy
Inserm directors
APA Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology recipients