Stanislas Dehaene enters a small library inside the mansion that houses the French ministry of education. Autumn light filters down from a skylight, illuminating glass-fronted bookshelves holding the journaux officiels – the laws, decrees, regulations and rules of the French Republic. Dehaene takes his place and flips open his laptop as members file in.
As president of the Scientific Council for National Education, a body charged with advising the government on evidence-based learning, Dehaene has a pressing concern: Le Monde has just accused the Council of racism. As he shares this news, the warmth in his voice disappears, replaced by something sharper.
He asks the group to share his rebuttal on social media because Le Monde has declined to print it. ‘I find it ridiculous that we have to waste time responding to such things,’ he says. ‘It’s an accusation completely beside the truth.’
Aworld-renowned cognitive neuroscientist, Dehaene has published hundreds of refereed journal articles and seven books for general readers on reading, mathematics, consciousness and learning. More than a decade ago, he set out to do something that sounded straightforward: take four decades of research mapping how the brain learns, and compel education systems to follow its insights. He thought the evidence would speak for itself. Instead, he has run into the deeply human resistance of politics, identity and belief. In France, more than one in four children arrive at secondary school without a firm grasp of reading or mathematics. Dehaene does not see these as abstract statistics but rather as the cost children pay for that resistance.
‘It’s been eight years, and the scores of French children are changing a tiny little bit,’ he says with a deep sigh. ‘It’s very, very difficult. The social forces are enormous.’
The previous day, I visited him at his brain-imaging lab, NeuroSpin, in the Parisian suburb of Saclay, where he took me down a hallway known as ‘magnet street’ to the facility’s massive MRI equipment. He paused outside the control room of the newest MRI magnet, an 11.7-tesla scanner, one of the strongest human-rated machines in the world, which displays the brain in finer anatomical detail than ever seen before. A loud mechanical buzz pulsed in the hallway – the vibration of the magnet’s electromagnetic coils. ‘Do you have a pacemaker or anything like that?’ he asked before opening the door.
Inside, researchers huddled around computer screens, and a video monitor displayed a fuzzy image of the tube’s interior. It’s one thing to get adults to lie down in the noisy, claustrophobic setting of an MRI tube, but Dehaene, along with his wife, the paediatrician Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, has worked hard to make children comfortable in this setting.
In one experiment, they put three-month-olds in the tube – the babies had just been fed, wore headphones, and were placed in a specially designed cradle – and played them short sentences, some spoken normally and some played backward, a way to strip out language’s meaning while keeping its raw sound intact.
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