Stanislas Dehaene

Professor Stanislas Dehaene holds the Chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology at the Collége de France, Paris. He directs the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit at NeuroSpin in Saclay, south of Paris, France's advanced brain imaging research center. He is also the president of the Scientific Council for Education of the French ministry of education. Stanislas Dehaene is recognized as one of Europe’s most prominent brain scientists. He is well known for his pioneering studies of “the number sense”, the innate brain circuits that we share with other primates and that allow us to understand numbers and mathematics. He is also a specialist of reading and uncovered the function of the ''visual word form area'', a left-hemisphere region that specializes for letters when we learn to read. Those discoveries have fostered his strong interest for learning and education. With his wife Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, he has made fundamental discoveries on infants’ brain organization for language, and on how education to mathematics, reading and bilingualism shape the human brain. He has also observed some of the earliest “signatures of consciousness", i.e. patterns of brain responses that are unique to conscious processing and can be used to diagnose coma and vegetative-state patients. Prof. Dehaene has accumulated numerous awards and prizes. In 2014, he was awarded the Grete Lundbeck Brain Prize, a 1-million € award which is considered the Nobel prize in the field (with G. Rizzolatti and T. Robbins). He is also a member of eight academies: the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the French Académie des Sciences, the British Academy, Academia Europae, the Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium, and the European Molecular Biology Organization EMBO. With an h-index of 173, Prof. Dehaene is a Thomas Reuters highly cited researcher. His research has been featured in numerous publications including a full-length portrait in the New Yorker (“The Numbers Guy”, by Jim Holt, 2008). He is the author of five books, three television documentaries, and over 400 scientific publications in journals such as Science, Nature, Nature Neuroscience, and PNAS. 70 of his articles were cited more than 500 times. His books are a huge success, have been translated in fifteen languages, and several have received awards for best science writing: • The Number Sense (1999): Jean Rostand award • Reading in the Brain (2009): A Washington Post science book of the year • Consciousness and the brain (2013): Grand Prix RTL-Lire for Best science book of the year • How we Learn: why brains learn better than any machine… for now. (2020) Penguin Viking. Book of the year, the French Society for Neurology. • Seeing the mind (2023). To appear at MIT Press.