Top 35 Stanislas Dehaene Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Attention, which amplifies the information we focus on. Active engagement, an algorithm also called “curiosity,” which encourages our brain to ceaselessly test new hypotheses. Error feedback, which compares our predictions with reality and corrects our models of the world. Consolidation, which renders what we have learned fully automated and involves sleep as a key component.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

2. “Nothing in our evolution could have prepared us to absorb language through vision. Yet brain imaging demonstrates that the adult brain contains fixed circuitry exquisitely attuned to reading.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

3. “It’s easy to miss something you’re not looking for. On a busy road, this could be fatal – look out for cyclists!”

— Stanislas Dehaene

4. “The moral here is that nature and nurture should not be opposed. Pure learning, in the absence of any innate constraints, simply does not exist.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

5. “Amazingly, most teachers receive little or no professional training in the science of learning. My feeling is that we should urgently change this state of affairs, because we now possess considerable scientific knowledge about the brain’s learning algorithms and the pedagogies that are the most efficient.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

6. “Being active and engaged does not mean that the body must move. Active engagement takes place in our brains, not our feet. The brain learns efficiently only if it is attentive, focused, and active in generating mental models.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

7. “This is why every student should learn to pay attention – and also why teachers should pay more attention to attention! If students don’t attend to the right information, it is quite unlikely that they will learn anything. A teacher’s greatest talent consists of constantly channeling and capturing children’s attention in order to properly guide them.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

8. “The notion that the world is mostly made up of small sets is an illusion imposed on us by our perceptual and cognitive systems.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

9. “In point of fact, the greater one’s science, the deeper the sense of mystery. – Vladimir.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

10. “We first made this observation in literate and illiterate adults, but we quickly replicated our results in children who were learning to read.44 As soon as a child begins to read, the visual word form area begins to respond in the left hemisphere. Meanwhile its symmetrical counterpart, in the right hemisphere, strengthens its response to faces.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

11. “I do not mean, of course, that we can always accurately express our conscious thoughts with Proustian accuracy. Consciousness overflows language: we perceive vastly more than we can describe.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

12. “Literature was not born the day when a boy crying “wolf, wolf” came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying “wolf, wolf” and there was no wolf behind him. Consciousness.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

13. “All research findings are remarkably convergent: enriching the environment of a young child helps her build a better brain.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

14. “So, let us spare them this distress and give them the most neutral and informative feedback possible. Error feedback should not be confused with punishment.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

15. “As Emmanuel Giroux says, paraphrasing The Little Prince, “In geometry, what is essential is invisible to the eye. It is only with the mind that you can see well.” In mathematics, sensory experiences do not matter much; it is the ideas and concepts that do the heavy lifting.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

16. “During evolution, four major functions appeared that maximized the speed with which we extracted information from our environment. I call them the four pillars of learning, because each of them plays an essential role in the stability of our mental constructions.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

17. “The message is clear: attention radically changes brain activity. Paying attention to the overall shape of the words prevents the discovery of the alphabetic code and directs brain activity toward an inadequate circuit in the opposite hemisphere. To learn to read, phonics training is essential.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

18. “What matters is receiving explicit feedback that reduces the learner’s uncertainty.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

19. “Whatever input a brain region cannot explain is therefore passed on to the next level, which then attempts to make sense of it. We may conceive of the cortex as a massive hierarchy of predictive systems, each of which tries to explain the inputs and exchanges the remaining error messages with the others, in the hope that they may do a better job.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

20. “All infants are genial linguists: as early as eighteen months of age, they easily acquire ten to twenty words a day – but only if they are spoken to.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

21. “The expansion of one stops the other – and because letters settle down in the left hemisphere, which is dominant for language, faces have no choice but to move to the right side.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

22. “Alerting, which indicates when to attend, and adapts our level of vigilance. Orienting, which signals what to attend to, and amplifies any object of interest. Executive attention, which decides how to process the attended information, selects the processes that are relevant to a given task, and controls their execution.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

23. “Teachers who manage to mobilize all four functions in their students will undoubtedly maximize the speed and efficiency with which their classes can learn.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

24. “Parents and teachers complain that today’s children, plugged into computers, tablets, consoles, and other devices, constantly zap from one activity to the next and have lost the capacity to concentrate – but this is untrue. Far from reducing our ability to concentrate, video games can actually increase it.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

25. “Pure discovery learning, the idea that children can teach themselves, is one of many educational myths that have been debunked but still remain curiously popular.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

26. “In the human species, the peak of synaptic overproduction ends around two years of age in the visual cortex, three or four years of age in the auditory cortex, and between five and ten years of age in the prefrontal cortex.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

27. “So, does literacy lead to a knockout or a blockade of the cortex? Our experiments suggest the latter: learning to read blocks the growth of face-recognition areas in the left hemisphere.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

28. “Education is the main accelerator of our brain.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

29. “Not only are they imprecise, but they are also often delayed by several weeks, at which point most students have long forgotten which aspects of their inner reasoning misled them.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

30. “Curiosity is therefore a force that encourages us to explore. From this perspective, it resembles the drive for food or sexual partners, except that it is motivated by an intangible value: the acquisition of information.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

31. “This is a revolution: for millions of years, evolution had been content with fuzzy quantities. Symbol learning is a powerful factor for change: with education, all our brain circuits are repurposed to allow for the manipulation of exact numbers.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

32. “If you are dyslexic, then any of your siblings has a 50 percent chance of also suffering from dyslexia, thus pointing to the strong genetic determinism of this developmental disorder. At least four genes have now been implicated in dyslexia – and interestingly, most of these genes affect the ability of neurons to migrate to their final locations in the cortex during pregnancy.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

33. “The persistence of such analog effects in an educated brain betrays the ancient roots of our concept of numbers.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

34. “In adulthood, this social conformism persists and grows. Even the most trivial of our perceptual decisions, such as judging the length of a line, are influenced by social context: when our neighbors come to a different conclusion than us, we frequently revise our judgment to align it with theirs, even when their answer seems implausible.47 In such cases, the social animal in us overrides the rational beast.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

35. “Very slowly, the representation of faces changed: as the children became more and more literate, face responses increased in the right hemisphere, in direct proportion to reading scores.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

36. “Science often progresses by carving out new distinctions that refine the fuzzy categories of natural language.”

— Stanislas Dehaene