British Dyslexia Association International Conference: Professor Stanislas Dehaene

Professor Stanislas Dehaene holds the Chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology at the Collége de France in Paris. He directs the NeuroSpin centre in Saclay, south of Paris - France's advanced neuroimaging research centre.

His research investigates the neural bases of human cognitive functions such as reading, calculation and language, with a particular interest for the differences between conscious and non-conscious processing, and for the impact of education on the brain. His main research findings include the discovery of automatic links between numbers and space, and of the role of the intraparietal sulcus in number sense; the operation of the ''visual word form area'', a left occipito-temporal region which acquires the visual component of reading; and the identification of physiological responses unique to conscious processing, supporting the theory of a ''global neuronal workspace'' for consciousness.

The awards that Prof. Dehaene has accumulated during his career are numerous; among the latest are APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award (2015), Thomas Reuters Highly Cited Researcher (2014), and The Grete Lundbeck Brain Prize (with G. Rizzolatti and T. Robbins) (€ 1 million) (2014).

Prof. Dehaene is a member of six academies, including the British Academy, the American Philosophical Society, the French Académie des Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences USA. On April 2016 he received his second ERC advanced grant.

Prof. Dehaene is the author of several books for the general public, including The Number Sense, Reading in the Brain, Consciousness and the Brain, and How We Learn, which were translated into more than fifteen languages. He has also created three television documentaries and authored more than 300 scientific publications in journals such as Science, Nature, Nature Neuroscience, and PNAS. 40 of his articles were cited more than 500 times.