8 Quotes by Stanislas Dehaene

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.