Stanislas Dehaene was trained as a mathematician and psychologist before becoming one of the world’s most active researchers on the cognitive neuroscience of language and number processing in the human brain. He is the director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit in Saclay, France, the professor of experimental cognitive psychology at the Collège de France, a member of the French Academy of Sciences and of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He has published extensively in peer-reviewed scientific journals and is the author of The Number Sense and Reading in the Brain. He lives in France.
“Ambitious . . . Dehaene offers nothing less than a blueprint for
brainsplaining one of the world’s deepest mysteries. . . . [A]
fantastic book.”
—The Washington Post
“Dehaene is a maestro of the unconscious.”
—Scientific American Mind
“Brilliant… Dehaene’s special contribution is his global-workspace
theory, the first step in a complete account of why some neural
processes lead to conscious experience…. Dehaene’s account is the
most sophisticated story about the neural basis of consciousness so
far. It is essential reading for those who want to experience the
excitement of the search for the mind in the brain.”
--Chris Frith, Nature
“In Consciousness and the Brain, [Dehaene] summaries the fruits of
two decades of vigorous experimentation and modeling…. The book
introduces the methods that acted as midwife at the birth of a
science of consciousness…. Postulating that global availability of
information is what we subjectively experience as a conscious state
begets the question of why…. Answering such questions requires an
information-theoretical account of what type of data, communicated
within what system, gives rise to conscious experience in
biological or artificial organisms. Dehaene’s well-written and
well-sourced book avoids this, as this, as he opts to restrict it
to behavioral and neuronal observables.”
—Christof Koch, Science
“Consciousness tomes have become a dime a dozen over the past
decade or so, with every last researcher feeling the need to join
the fray. But Stanislas Dehaene is one of the few at the top of the
disciplines involved – philosophy, history, cognitive psychology,
brain imaging, computer modelling – to add something new.”
—New Scientist
“An excellent teacher with a gift for vivid analogies, Dehaene
writes that ‘consciousness is like the spokesperson in a large
institution . . . with a staff of a hundred billion neurons’
issuing briefs that tell us what we need to know moment by moment.
He then explains his and his colleagues’ groundbreaking theory
about the “global neuronal workspace,” where information is made
‘available to the rest of the brain,’ wowing us with descriptions
of our pyramidal neurons and their spiny dendrites and the
discovery that each neuron ‘cares’ about such specific stimuli as
‘faces, hands, objects.’ A stunning delineation of the “exquisite
biological machinery” that has made us an animal unlike any
other.”
—Booklist, starred review
“A revealing and definitely not dumbed-down overview of what we
know about consciousness.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Stanislas Dehaene’s remarkable book is the best modern treatment
of consciousness I have read to date. Dehaene, a world-class
scientist, has pioneered the development of a set of experiments
for studying consciousness that have revolutionized the field and
given us the first direct approach to its biology. Simply stated
this book is a tour de force. It opens up a whole new world of
intellectual exploration for the general reader.”
—Eric Kandel, author of In Search of Memory and The Age of Insight,
and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
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