Colloquium “Seeing the mind, educating the brain”

Collège De France

11 Place Marcelin Berthelot, Paris

Oct 1-3, 2025

Over the past decades, behavioral measures, brain imaging and neurophysiological recordings, in both humans and non-human primates, have led to major progress in understanding the neuronal and circuit-level properties that support cognitive functions such as visual recognition, spatial navigation and decision making. Human cognition is special, however, in its unique capacity to acquire new concepts and abilities through learning and education, particularly in the domain of language and mathematics. How far are we from understanding the neural mechanisms that allow us to acquire abstract concepts and symbols? Can we understand which cognitive toolkit is present in all brains since infancy, and how it changes with education? Can we separate the mechanisms of conscious and unconscious processing, and their respective contributions to human learning? To what extent does current animal research shed sufficient light on human computations? Are we still missing fundamental ideas, concepts, theories, and empirical tools to bridge between neuroscience and higher-level cognition? 
On the occasion of Stanislas’ sixtieth birthday, he is delighted to invite some of the leading scientists—Jean-Pierre Changeux, Nancy Kanwisher, Elizabeth Spelke, Naama Friedmann, among others—who have played a key role in shaping his ideas.
The program will feature discussions on the future of our field over the next two decades, along with a celebration of science, life, and friendship.

Seeing the mind, educating the brain 

 Oct 1-3, 2025 

 Collège De France – 11 Place Marcelin Berthelot -Paris 

 


Wednesday, October 1 – Navarre Amphitheater

Free and open to all

9:00  –  Stanislas Dehaene
Introduction

Part 1: Seeing and Decoding the Mind

9:10 – Nancy Kanwisher

9:50 – Doris Tsao

10:30 – Pieter Roelfsema
Conscious perception: the propagation of selection signals through the global neuronal workspace

11:10 – Break

11:30 – Liping Wang
The control of sequence working memory in the prefrontal cortex

12:10 – Lionel Naccache

12:50 – Lunch Break

Part 2: Training and Educating the Brain

14:20 – Jean-Rémi King
The Neural Code of Language in the Human Brain

15:00 – Andreas Nieder
Number neurons in the medial temporal lobe of humans

15:40 – Josef Parvizi
Numerical cognition explored with direct recordings from inside the human brain

16:20 – Break

16:40 – Elizabeth Spelke
Educability

17:20 – Naama Friedmann

18:00 – End of Day

Thursday, October 2 – Halbwachs Amphitheater

Participation upon registration only

Theme: Numerical and Mathematical Development

9:10 – Edward Hubbard
Illuminating fractions learning: neuronal recycling of non-symbolic ratios for symbolic fractions

9:50 – Justin Halberda
Approximate number system precision and educational outcomes across four continents

10:10 – Evelyn Eger
Pattern codes for numerical quantity during perception and internal computation in the human brain

10:30 – Pedro Pinheiro-Chagas
Spatiotemporal dynamics and representational codes of arithmetic processing in the human brain

10:50 – Break

Theme: Infancy, Development, and Education

11:10 – Bruce McCandliss
Educational influences on the emergence of brain function across multiple time scales

11:50 – Lisa Feigenson

Developmental origins of human curiosity

12:10 – Véronique Izard
Why is conceptual learning so hard?

12:30 – Luca Bonatti

The state of the State of the Arts of the Language of thought 

12:50 – Lunch Break

Theme: Perception and Consciousness

14:10 – Jean-Pierre Changeux
The global neuronal workspace from the molecular to the cognitive level: Consequences for pathology and pharmacology. 

14:50 – Lucia Melloni

15:30 – Biyu Jade He
Neural mechanisms of conscious visual perception in humans

16:10 – Claire Sergent

The global workspace model of consciousness: then and now

16:30 – End of Day

Friday, October 3 – Halbwachs Amphitheater

Participation upon registration only

Theme: Space, Time, and Number

9:10 – Edvard Moser
Grid cells – geometry in space and time

9:50 – Manuela Piazza
Space as the fabric of thought

10:30 – Fosca Al Roumi

How humans compress information in memory: the Language of Thought hypothesis 

10:50 – Lorenzo Ciccione
The perception and understanding of patterns and graphics

11:10  –  Break

Theme: Neural Codes in Monkeys and Humans

11:30 – Arun SP

Neural basis of real-world vision

12:10 – Florian Mormann
Single-neuron correlates of perception and memory in the human medial temporal lobe

12:50 – Lunch Break

Theme: Human Singularity

14:20 – Floris de Lange
Uniquely human prediction?

15:00 – Valentin Wyart

15:20 – Mathias Sablé-Meyer
Dissecting the Language of Thought Hypothesis across Marr’s levels

15:40 – Josh Tenenbaum

16:20 – Stanislas Dehaene
Concluding remarks

16:30 – End of Colloquium