Dehaene then returned to France, where he began his own research group, which today numbers nearly 30 graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and researchers. In 2005, he was elected to the newly created Chair of Experimental Psychology at the Collège de France.

Dehaene was one of ten people to be awarded the James S. McDonnell Foundation Centennial Fellowship in 1999 for his work on the “Cognitive Neuroscience of Numeracy”. In 2003, together with Denis Le Bihan, Dehaene was awarded the Grand Prix scientifique de la Fondation Louis D. from the Institut de France. In 2014, together with Giacomo Rizzolatti and Trevor Robbins, he was awarded the Brain Prize.

Dehaene is best known for his work on numerical cognition, a discipline which he popularized and synthesized with the publication of his 1997 book, The Number Sense (La Bosse des maths) which won the Prix Jean-Rostand [fr] for best French language general-audience scientific book. He began his studies of numerical cognition with Jacques Mehler, examining the cross-linguistic frequency of number words, whether numbers were understood in an analog or compositional manner, and the connection between numbers and space (the “SNARC effect”). With Changeux, he then developed a computational model of numerical abilities, which predicted log-gaussian tuning functions for number neurons, a finding which has now been elegantly confirmed with single-unit physiology

After receiving his doctorate, Dehaene became a research scientist at INSERM in the Cognitive Sciences and Psycholinguistics Laboratory (Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique) directed by Mehler. He also spent two years, from 1992 to 1994, as a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences, with Michael Posner at the University of Oregon.

Inspired by his reading of Changeux’s work, Dehaene began to collaborate with him on computational neuronal models of human cognition, including working memory and task control, collaborations which continue to the present day. Dehaene then completed his PhD in Experimental Psychology in 1989 with Jacques Mehler at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris.

Dehaene began his training as a mathematician, studying mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris from 1984 to 1989. He obtained his master’s degree in Applied mathematics and computer science in 1985 from the University of Paris VI. He turned to neuroscience and psychology after reading Jean-Pierre Changeux’s book, L’Homme neuronal (Neuronal Man: The Biology of The Mind).

Stanislas Dehaene (born May 12, 1965) is a French author and cognitive neuroscientist whose research centers on a number of topics, including numerical cognition, the neural basis of reading and the neural correlates of consciousness. As of 2017, he is a professor at the Collège de France and, since 1989, the director of INSERM Unit 562, “Cognitive Neuroimaging”.