Stanislas Dehaene is a Professor at the College de France and has been director of INREM Unit “Cognitive Neuroimaging” He has worked on a number of topics, including numerical cognition, the neural basis ofreading and theneuro correlates of conciousness. Dehaene was one of ten people to be awarded the James S. Mc.Donnel Foundation Centennial Fellowship in 1999 for his work on the “Cognitive Neuroscience of Numeracy”. Dehaene is the author of more than 120 peer reviewed publications, author of two books, and editor of four others.
Dehaene's Book
READING IN THE BRAIN. The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention
This book is one of hie most popular book. He explain that reading supplies our brains with an external hard drive and gives us access to our species’s past: In the words of Francisco de Quevedo, it enables us “to listen to the dead with our eyes.”
Amazingly, most children become proficient readers during elementary school (although learning to read Italian is easier, and learning to read Chinese harder, than learning to read English). In recent years, new imaging techniques have allowed researchers to watch normal brains in the act of reading, and studies have shed light on why the brains of dyslexic children, as well as those of certain stroke victims, fail to process written words successfully.
“Only a stroke of good fortune allowed us to read,” Dehaene writes near the end of his tour of the reading brain. Research suggests that, in humans, a corresponding area evolved to become what Dehaene calls the “letterbox,” responsible for processing incoming written words. Children learn reading in a stepwise process: first, awareness that words are made up of phonemes or speech sounds (ba, da); then the discovery that there’s a correspondence between these speech sounds and pairs or groups of letters. Later the child begins to recognize entire words, and after a few years, reading speed becomes independent of word length.
Dehaene deplores the whole-language approach to teaching reading in which beginning readers are presented with entire words or phrases in the hope of fostering earlier comprehension of text. He cites research showing that children who first learn which sounds are represented by which letters, and how pairs or groups of letters correspond to speech sounds, make steadier progress and achieve better reading scores than those taught using the whole-language method. Between 5 percent and 17 percent of U.S. children suffer from dyslexia, or severe difficulty in reading. Several susceptibility genes have been identified, most of them influencing the migration of nerve cells within the developing brain of the fetus.
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