MBB 2007 Distinguished Lecture Series
with Stanislas Dehaene and Critics
Harvard University - April 3, 4, & 5
Yenching Auditorium, 2 Divinity Ave, Cambridge, MA
- Tuesday, April 3, 4pm
Recycling the Visual Brain for Reading
Stanislas Dehaene, Albert Galaburda, Marc Hauser - Wednesday, April 4, 5pm
Space, Time, and Number: Cerebral Foundations of Mathematical Intuitions
Stanislas Dehaene, Peter Galison, Lisa Randall - Thursday, April 5, 5pm
Conscious Processing and The Human Turing Machine
Stanislas Dehaene, Steven Pinker, Stuart Shieber
Please join us on the above dates for a series of conversations with Professor Stanislas Dehaene, Director of the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit (INSERM is the French equivalent of the U.S. National Institutes of Health) and Chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology at the College de France. Professor Dehaene will be joined by Harvard faculty to discuss interesting issues dealing with the brain and cognition, with a special focus on consciousness, mathematics, reading, and language. There is an overarching theme to this series, but the talks are intended to be somewhat independent, so if you do happen to miss one, you will still be able to attend and enjoy the others. Of course, we hope you will be able to join us for all three!
Please note the start time for the first talk is 4pm, the other talks start at 5pm.
All talks are open to the public.
Participant info:
- Dr. Stanislas Dehaene
Professor Stanislas Dehaene received his training in mathematics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, then completed a PhD in cognitive psychology with Jacques Mehler, post-doctoral studies with Michael Posner, as well as neuronal modelling studies with Jean-Pierre Changeux. He has been working since 1997 at the Orsay brain imaging center near Paris (Service Hospitalier Frédéric Joliot of the Commissariat A l'Energie Atomique), where he has directed the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit since 2001. In September 2005 he was elected as a full professor and the newly created chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology at the Collège de France in Paris.
Stanislas Dehaene's interests concern the cerebral bases of specifically human cognitive functions such as language, calculation, and reasoning. The team uses a variety of experimental methods, including mental chronometry in normal subjects, cognitive analyses of brain-lesioned patients, and brain-imaging studies with positron emission tomography, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and high-density recordings of event-related potentials. Formal models of minimal neuronal networks are also devised and simulated in an attempt to throw some links between molecular, physiological, imaging, and behavioral data.
Stanislas Dehaene's main scientific contributions include the study of the organization of the cerebral system for number processing. Using converging evidence from PET, ERPs, fMRI, and brain lesions, Stanislas Dehaene demonstrated the central role played by a region of the intraparietal sulcus in understanding quantities and arithmetic (the number sense). He was also the first to demonstrate that subliminal presentations of words can yield detectable cortical activations in fMRI, and has used these data to support an original theory of conscious and nonconscious processing in the human brain. With neurologist Laurent Cohen, he also studied the neural networks of reading and demonstrated the crucial role of the left occipito-temporal region in word recognition (the visual word form area).
Stanislas Dehaene is the author of over 100 scientific publications in major international journals. He has received several international prizes including the McDonnell Centennial Fellowship and the Louis D prize of the French Academy of Sciences (with D. Lebihan). He has published an acclaimed book (The Number Sense ), which has been translated in eight languages. He has also edited three books on brain imaging, consciousness, and brain evolution, and has authored two general-audience films on the human brain. He is the associate editor of Cognition, an international journal of Cognitive Science. - Marc Hauser
MBB Co-Chair; Harvard College Professor and Professor of Psychology at Harvard University - Albert Galaburda
Emily Fisher Landau Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience, Harvard Medical School
Chief of the Division of Behavioral Neurology in the Department of Neurology
at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center - Peter Galison
Joseph Pellegrino University Professor and Mallinckrodt Professor of History of Science and of Physics - Lisa Randall
Professor of Physics at Harvard University - Steven Pinker
Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University - Stuart Shieber
Harvard College Professor
James O. Welch, Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University