Consciousness and the Brain

Stanislas Dehaene was trained as a mathematician and psychologist before becoming one of the world s most active researchers on the cognitive neuroscience of language and number processing in the human brain. He is the director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit in Saclay, France, the professor of experimental cognitive psychology at the Collège de France, a member of the French Academy of Sciences and of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He has published extensively in peer-reviewed scientific journals and is the author of The Number Sense and Reading in the Brain. He lives in France.

Ambitious . . . Dehaene offers nothing less than a blueprint for brainsplaining one of the world s deepest mysteries. . . . [A] fantastic book.
The Washington Post

Dehaene is a maestro of the unconscious.
Scientific American Mind

Brilliant Dehaene s special contribution is his global-workspace theory, the first step in a complete account of why some neural processes lead to conscious experience . Dehaene s account is the most sophisticated story about the neural basis of consciousness so far. It is essential reading for those who want to experience the excitement of the search for the mind in the brain.
--Chris Frith, Nature
 
In Consciousness and the Brain, [Dehaene] summaries the fruits of two decades of vigorous experimentation and modeling . The book introduces the methods that acted as midwife at the birth of a science of consciousness . Postulating that global availability of information is what we subjectively experience as a conscious state begets the question of why . Answering such questions requires an information-theoretical account of what type of data, communicated within what system, gives rise to conscious experience in biological or artificial organisms. Dehaene s well-written and well-sourced book avoids this, as this, as he opts to restrict it to behavioral and neuronal observables.
Christof Koch, Science
 
Consciousness tomes have become a dime a dozen over the past decade or so, with every last researcher feeling the need to join the fray. But Stanislas Dehaene is one of the few at the top of the disciplines involved philosophy, history, cognitive psychology, brain imaging, computer modelling to add something new.
New Scientist
 
An excellent teacher with a gift for vivid analogies, Dehaene writes that consciousness is like the spokesperson in a large institution . . . with a staff of a hundred billion neurons issuing briefs that tell us what we need to know moment