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The New York Times is interested in the studies on the sensitivity to geometry conducted at NeuroSpin


In an article in the New York Times, Stanislas Dehaene (NeuroSpin director) and Mathias Sablé-Meyer (PhD student) discuss recent results obtained in collaboration with the Collège de France, the CNRS and the University of Paris 8 that show that humans have a universal capacity to understand abstract geometric concepts.

Published on 31 March 2022

​The Pontifical Academy of Sciences organized a symposium[1] in October 2021 to discuss the "neural" peculiarity of the human species that has allowed it to reach a higher level of consciousness than other species. Stanislas Dehaene's speech, introduced by a number of photographs of engravings made of symbols and dating back to the Bronze Age, piqued the curiosity of a journalist from The New York Times, Siobhan Roberts. He wanted to know more about the knowledge accumulated by neuroscientists demonstrating a particular affinity of humans for geometry. In a long article "Is geometry a language that only humans know?", the journalist goes back at length on results published in 2021 in the journal PNAS (Sensitivity to geometric shape regularity in humans and baboons: A putative signature of human singularity.) and which are the result of a collaboration between UNICOG/NeuroSpin, the Collège de France, the CNRS and the Université Paris 8

[1] « Symbols, Myths and Religious Sense in Humans Since the First», 2021, 27-28 october, Vatican


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