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 ...
, the neural basis of
reading
Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of letters, symbols, etc., especially by sight or touch.
For educators and researchers, reading is a multifaceted process involving such areas as word recognition, orthography (spelling ...
and the
neural correlate
The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) refer to the relationships between mental states and neural states and constitute the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms sufficient for a specific conscious percept. Neuroscientists use emp ...
s of
consciousness
Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...
. As of 2017, he is a professor at the
Collège de France
The Collège de France (), formerly known as the ''Collège Royal'' or as the ''Collège impérial'' founded in 1530 by François I, is a higher education and research establishment ('' grand établissement'') in France. It is located in Paris n ...
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
The James S. McDonnell Foundation was founded in 1950 by aerospace pioneer James S. McDonnell. It was established to "improve the quality of life," and does so by contributing to the generation of new knowledge through its support of research and ...
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 Académie Française. 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 ...
. He was elected to the
American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...
in 2010. In 2014, together with
Giacomo Rizzolatti
Giacomo Rizzolatti (born 28 April 1937) is an Italian neurophysiologist who works at the University of Parma. Born in Kyiv, UkSSR, he is the Senior Scientist of the research team that discovered mirror neurons in the frontal and parietal corte ...
and
Trevor Robbins
Trevor William Robbins CBE FRS FMedSci is a Professor of cognitive neuroscience and former Head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. Robbins interests are in the fields of cognitive neuroscience, behavioural neuros ...
, he was awarded
the Brain Prize
The Brain Prize, formerly known as The Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Prize, is an international scientific award honouring "one or more scientists who have distinguished themselves by an outstanding contribution to neuroscience and who are ...
.
Dehaene is an associate editor of the journal ''Cognition'', and a member of the editorial board of several other journals, including ''
NeuroImage
''NeuroImage'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering research on neuroimaging, including functional neuroimaging and functional human brain mapping. The current Editor in Chief is Michael Breakspear. Abstracts from the annual meeting o ...
'', ''
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 a ...
'', ''Developmental Science'', and ''Neuroscience of Consciousness''.
Early life and education
Dehaene studied mathematics at the
École Normale Supérieure
École may refer to:
* an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée)
* École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France
* École, S ...
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
Pierre and Marie Curie University (french: link=no, Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, UPMC), also known as Paris 6, was a public research university in Paris, France, from 1971 to 2017. The university was located on the Jussieu Campus in the L ...
.
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 at the
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
The School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (french: École des hautes études en sciences sociales; EHESS) is a graduate ''grande école'' and '' grand établissement'' in Paris focused on academic research in the social sciences. The ...
(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 research university in Eugene, Oregon. Founded in 1876, the institution is well known for its strong ties to the sports apparel and marketing firm Nike, Inc, and its co-founder, billion ...
.
Dehaene returned to France, where he 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 Psychology at the
Collège de France
The Collège de France (), formerly known as the ''Collège Royal'' or as the ''Collège impérial'' founded in 1530 by François I, is a higher education and research establishment ('' grand établissement'') in France. It is located in Paris n ...
.
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 ...
, 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
Pitié-Salpêtrière University Hospital (french: Hôpital universitaire la Pitié-Salpêtrière, ) is a teaching hospital in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. Part of the and a teaching hospital of Sorbonne University.
History
The Salpêtrià ...
in Paris, Dehaene also identified patients with lesions in different regions of the
parietal lobe
The parietal lobe is one of the four 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 integrates sensory informa ...
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 neur ...
) and others with impaired subtraction, but preserved multiplication (associated with lesions to the intraparietal sulcus). This
double dissociation
In neuropsychology, dissociation involves identifying the neural substrate of a particular brain function through identification of case studies, neuroimaging, or neuropsychological testing.
Dissociation types
Single dissociation
When dissectin ...
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
Electroencephalography (EEG) is a method to record an electrogram of the spontaneous electrical activity of the brain. The biosignals detected by EEG have been shown to represent the postsynaptic potentials of pyramidal neurons in the neocortex ...
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
Pierre Pica (born January 5, 1951), is a research associate (Chargé de Recherche) at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. Associated Professor with the Brain Institute of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, he is a spec ...
, and
Elizabeth Spelke
Elizabeth Shilin Spelke FBA (born May 28, 1949) is an American cognitive psychologist at the Department of Psychology of Harvard University and director of the Laboratory for Developmental Studies.
Starting in the 1980s, she carried out experi ...
, Stanislas Dehaene has studied the numeracy and numeral expressions of the
Mundurucu
The Munduruku, also known as Mundurucu or Wuy Jugu or
BMJ, 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 ...
(an indigenous tribe living in Para,
Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
).
Consciousness
Dehaene subsequently turned his attention to work on the
neural correlates of consciousness
The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) refer to the relationships between mental states and neural states and constitute the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms sufficient for a specific conscious percept. Neuroscientists use emp ...
, leading to numerous scientific articles, an edited book, "The Cognitive Neuroscience of
Consciousness
Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...
" and is the Past President of the
Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. Dehaene has developed computational models of consciousness, based on
Bernard Baars'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, which show that information that reaches conscious awareness leads to increased activation in a network of
parietal and
frontal
Front may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Films
* ''The Front'' (1943 film), a 1943 Soviet drama film
* ''The Front'', 1976 film
Music
* The Front (band), an American rock band signed to Columbia Records and active in the 1980s and e ...
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 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 neurological disorders characterized by recurrent epileptic seizures. Epileptic seizures can vary from brief and nearly undetectable periods to long periods of vigorous shaking due to abnormal electrica ...
, 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. .
References
External links
Laboratory Websitefrom the
Edge Foundation
The Edge Foundation, Inc. is an association of science and technology intellectuals created in 1988 as an outgrowth of The Reality Club. Its main activities are reflected on the edge.org website, edited by publisher and businessman John Brock ...
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dehaene, Stanislas
1965 births
Living people
French neuroscientists
Mathematical cognition researchers
Collège de France faculty
Chevaliers of the Légion d'honneur
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