Speaker
Stanislas Dehaene
Professor at Collège de France, Chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology
Scientific Director of the NeuroSpin Brain Imaging Center, Saclay, France
Director of the Cognitive NeuroImaging Unit, INSERM-CEA-University Paris-Saclay
President of the French Scientific Council for Education
Cofounder of Excello Lab and Co-inventor of the Kalulu reading method
Bio
Prof. Stanislas Dehaene is one of the world’s leading cognitive neuroscientists, renowned for pioneering research on the neural foundations of mathematics, reading, language, learning, and consciousness. He is Professor of Experimental Cognitive Psychology at the Collège de France, Director of the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, and Scientific Director of the NeuroSpin brain imaging center in France. His work combines neuroscience, psychology, mathematics, and education to uncover how the human brain processes symbols, acquires knowledge, and generates conscious thought. He is a member of numerous prestigious academies, including the French Academy of Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Society, and has received many international honors and awards, including The Brain Prize (with G. Rizzolatte and T. Robbins), the world’s largest prize for brain research. Prof. Dehaene is also a widely acclaimed science communicator and bestselling author of influential books such as The Number Sense, Reading in the Brain, Consciousness and the Brain, and How We Learn.
Abstract
Why is Homo sapiens cognitively different from all other primates? Natural language is often seen as the single factor that explains the cognitive singularity of the human species. I will present data in support of an alternative hypothesis : human singularity is manifested much more broadly in the ability to acquire a variety of symbolic languages, akin to computer languages, to encode and compress structures in various domains (mathematics, music, shape…). These languages rely on cortical circuits parallel to, but distinct from classical language areas. Each is characterized by (1) the discretization of a domain using a small set of symbols, and (2) their recursive composition into mental programs that encode nested repetitions with variations. I will present several tasks of elementary geometric shape perception, visuo-spatial memory and auditory sequence processing, in which minimum description length in the proposed languages captures human behavior and brain activity. Functional MRI localizes the relevant parallel networks, including activations close to but distinct from the language-related Broca’s area, while magneto-encephalography tracks the postulated symbolic structures in real time. On this basis, I argue that symbols and their recursive composition lie at the core of human cognition.