Biography

Stanislas Dehaene is an alumnus of the École normale supérieure and holds a doctorate in cognitive psychology. In September 2005, he was appointed Professor at the Collège de France, in the newly-created chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology, after nearly ten years as Director of Research at Inserm. His research aims to elucidate the cerebral bases of the most fundamental operations of the human brain: reading, calculation, reasoning, awareness. His work has been rewarded by several prizes and grants, including the Louis D. prize from the Fondation de France (with D. Le Bihan), the Jean-Louis Signoret prize from the Fondation Ipsen and the centennial fellowship from the American McDonnell Foundation.

Research

Numbers in the brain

Stanislas Dehaene is the acknowledged expert in the brain basis of mathematical operations, a field he pioneered. He has designed new psychological tests for calculation and number comprehension, and applied them to brain-damaged patients with calculation disorders. His work led to the discovery that number intuition involves particular brain circuits, particularly those in the parietal lobe. Stanislas Dehaene used brain imaging methods to analyze the anatomical organization of these circuits, as well as their temporal course, demonstrating in an article published in Science in 1999 that approximate calculation calls on regions that are partially different from those of exact calculation. In collaboration with neurologist Laurent Cohen, he has observed new pathologies in these regions, leading some "acalculic" patients to lose all intuition of numbers. He has also shown striking homologies between number processing in humans and animals. Thus, the foundations of our arithmetical abilities have their origins in the evolution of the brain.