Stanislas Dehaene is professor at the Collège de France, where he holds the chair in experimental cognitive psychology, and is a member of the French Academy of Sciences. He is chairman of the Scientific Council of French National Education. He is the author of Les Neurones de la lecture [Reading in the Brain [ok?]]; La Bosse des maths [The Number Sense [ok?]]; Le Code de la conscience [Consciousness and the Brain [ok?]]; and Apprendre! [Learn!], all best-sellers.
A professor at the Collège de France for 15 years holding the chair in experimental cognitive psychology, the great neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene with this fifth book written for a general audience (following Le Code de la conscience and Apprendre!) offers what he considers to be his personal “curio cabinet:” with close to a hundred magnificent, astonishing images that have until now been unavailable to non-specialists, each one accompanied on the facing page by a short text that describes the image’s content and significance, the author illuminates the history of the discoveries that have enabled the spectacular advancement of our knowledge of the brain and its complex, exceptionally beautiful, malleable universe.

All that you have always wanted to know about the brain is collected here, in a particularly attractive and accessible way, by one of the most eminent international specialists.

From Vesalius’ first attempts at description, to the Renaissance; then, more recently, from Broca through the Nineteenth Century; from the discovery of neurons to their cartography, including the prodigious new techniques for identifying each neuron (there are close to 100 billion in the human brain); from the description of the structures of the brain to the installation of Iseult, the 150T MRI machine, the most powerful in the world, in the NeuroSpin research center on the CEA Paris-Saclay site, Stanislas Dehaene offers us a glimpse into the future of neurotechnology, as well as an overview of research throughout the world. These revelations go hand in hand with a reflection on the mind, on consciousness, and on what we can know of human nature.