Stanislas Dehaene is professor at the Collège de France, holds the Chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology, and is a member of the French Academy of Sciences. He is the author of Les Neurones de la lecture, La Bosse des maths, and Le Code de la conscience, all of them best-sellers. [were the books first written in English or French? I see English-language editions, but it’s not clear which are translations!]
“Our species has turned learning into its specialty. At school, at university, and at work, pressured to adapt ever more quickly, we juggle with our cerebral learning algorithms. However, we do so intuitively, without ever having ‘learned to learn.’ That’s a pity, because during the past thirty years, great progress has been made in the understanding of the fundamental principles of cerebral plasticity and learning.
Humanity discovered that it could improve that remarkable ability to learn even more thanks to an institution: school. Active pedagogy is a unique to our species: no other animal takes the time to teach new skills to its young, actively, while paying attention to their difficulties and their mistakes.
It seems fundamental to me that every child, every adult, today take fully into account the enormous potential of his or her own brain (and also, of course, of its limitations). When you close this book, I hope you will know a great deal more about your own learning processes.” (S. D.)