The Center for Literacy & Learning

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Stanislas Dehaene

Stanislas Dehaene

Stanislas Dehaene, Ph.D., is a French psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist. He is a professor at the Collège de France, Chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology. His research aims to elucidate the brain bases of the most fundamental operations of the human brain: reading, calculating, reasoning, awareness. His work has been acknowledged by several awards and grants, including the Louis D. Prize of the Fondation de France (with D. The Bihan), the Jean-Louis Signoret Award from the IPSEN Foundation, and the centennial fellowship of the American McDonnell Foundation. He is the author of multiple books including Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention (2009) and How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine…For Now (2020).

Keynote Session Description

The Acquisition of Reading: From Brain Imaging to the Classroom

Stanislas Dehaene

(New to the Science of Reading, Advanced Science of Reading)
Brain imaging studies show that learning to read has a major impact on the developing brain. In the first few months of reading acquisition, the child’s brain “recycles” several pre-existing visual and auditory areas and re-purposes them towards the processing of letters and phonemes. The nature of this “neuronal recycling” process helps explain many of the children’s difficulties in learning to read. Three major sites of enhancement are the early visual cortex, the visual word form area or “the brain’s letter box” (a region specializing for the visual recognition of letter strings) and the planum temporale (a region involved in phonological processing). In early readers, those regions operate under the supervisory control of attention networks in the parietal and prefrontal lobes. Recent work for multiple labs shows how those circuits may become dysfunctional, thus causing different forms of dyslexias. Those findings are important consequences for education. Education and brain imaging studies converge to suggest how reading should be taught, why it may fail in dyslexia, and what can be done about it.