Colloque - Seeing the Mind, Educating the Brain : Introduction

Stanislas Dehaene

Psychologie cognitive expérimentale

Collège de France

Année 2025-2026

Colloque: Seeing the Mind, Educating the Brain

Stanislas Dehaene: Introduction

Colloque en anglais.

Présentation

Over the past decades, behavioral measures, brain imaging and neurophysiological recordings, in both humans and non-human primates, have led to major progress in understanding the neuronal and circuit-level properties that support cognitive functions such as visual recognition, spatial navigation and decision making. Human cognition is special, however, in its unique capacity to acquire new concepts and abilities through learning and education, particularly in the domain of language and mathematics. How far are we from understanding the neural mechanisms that allow us to acquire abstract concepts and symbols? Can we understand which cognitive toolkit is present in all brains since infancy, and how it changes with education? Can we separate the mechanisms of conscious and unconscious processing, and their respective contributions to human learning? To what extent does current animal research shed sufficient light on human computations? Are we still missing fundamental ideas, concepts, theories, and empirical tools to bridge between neuroscience and higher-level cognition?

On the occasion of Stanislas' sixtieth birthday, he is delighted to invite some of the leading scientists—Jean-Pierre Changeux, Nancy Kanwisher, Elizabeth Spelke, Naama Friedmann, among others—who have played a key role in shaping his ideas.

The program will feature discussions on the future of our field over the next two decades, along with a celebration of science, life, and friendship.