This book investigates the philosophical, empirical, and theoretical bases on which a cognitive neuroscience of consciousness can be founded. The research questions reviewed include: Does perception occur without awareness? Can the neural bases of perceptual awareness be visualized with brain-imaging methods? What do unilateral neglect and extinction tell us about conscious and unconscious processing? What is the contribution of brainstem nuclei to conscious states? How can we identify mental processes uniquely associated with consciousness? An introductory chapter proposes a theoretical framework for building a cognitive neuroscience of consciousness, and two concluding chapters evaluate the progress made so far.
Stanislas Dehaene is a French psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist. He is currently heading the Cognitive NeuroImaging Unit within the NeuroSpin building of the Commissariat A l'Energie Atomique in Saclay near Paris, France's most advanced brain imaging center. He is also a professor at College de France in Paris, where he holds the newly created chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology. In 2005, he was elected as the youngest member of the French Academy of Sciences.
Stanislas Dehaene's interests concern the brain mechanisms of specifically human cognitive functions such as language, calculation, and conscious reasoning. His research relies on a variety of experimental methods, including mental chronometry in normal subjects, cognitive analyses of brain-lesioned patients, and brain-imaging studies with positron emission tomography, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and high-density recordings of event-related potentials. Formal models of minimal neuronal networks are also devised and simulated in an attempt to throw some links between molecular, physiological, imaging, and behavioral data.
Stanislas Dehaene's main scientific contributions include the study of the organization of the cerebral system for number processing. Using converging evidence from PET, ERPs, fMRI, and brain lesions, Stanislas Dehaene demonstrated the central role played by a region of the intraparietal sulcus in understanding quantities and arithmetic (the "number sense"). He was also the first to demonstrate that subliminal presentations of words can yield detectable cortical activations in fMRI, and has used these data to support an original theory of conscious and nonconscious processing in the human brain. With neurologist Laurent Cohen, he studied the neural networks of reading and demonstrated the crucial role of the left occipito-temporal region in word recognition (the "visual word form area").
Stanislas Dehaene is the author of over 190 scientific publications in major international journals. He has received several international prizes including the McDonnell Centennial Fellowship, the Louis D prize of the French Academy of Sciences (with D. Lebihan), and the Heineken prize in Cognitive Science from the Royal Academy of the Netherlands. He has published an acclaimed book The number sense, which has been translated in eight languages, and is publishing a new book Reading in the brain, to appear in November 2009. He has also edited three books on brain imaging, consciousness, and brain evolution, and has authored two general-audience documentaries on the human brain.
