1. In 1904, Binet took part in a commission set up by the French Ministry of Education to decide whether school children with learning difficulties should be sent to a special boarding school attached to a lunatic asylum, as advocated by the French psychiatrist and politician Desire-Magloire Bourneville, or whether they should be educated in classes attached to regular schools as advocated by the Societe libre pour l'etude psychologique de l'enfant of which Binet was a member.
Alfred Binet attended law school in Paris, and received his degree in 1878.
Alfred Binet educated himself by reading psychology texts at the National Library in Paris.
Alfred Binet soon became fascinated with the ideas of John Stuart Mill, who believed that the operations of intelligence could be explained by the laws of associationism.
Alfred Binet eventually realized the limitations of this theory, but Mill's ideas continued to influence his work.
In 1883, years of unaccompanied study ended when Alfred Binet was introduced to Charles Fere who introduced him to Jean-Martin Charcot, the director of a clinic called La Salpetriere, Paris.
Charcot became his mentor and in turn, Alfred Binet accepted a position at the clinic, working in the neurological laboratory.
Alfred Binet aggressively supported Charcot's position which included the belief that people with weakened, unstable nervous systems were susceptible to hypnosis.
Alfred Binet felt obliged to make an embarrassing public admission that he had been wrong in supporting his teacher.
Alfred Binet turned to the study of child development spurred on by the birth of his two daughters, Marguerite and Alice, born in 1885 and 1887.
Alfred Binet called Alice a subjectivist and Marguerite an objectivist, and developing the concepts of introspection and externospection in an anticipation of Carl Jung's psychological types.
Alfred Binet worked for a year without pay and by 1894, he took over as the director.
In 1899, Alfred Binet was asked to be a member of the Free Society for the Psychological Study of the Child.
Alfred Binet has received in turn a doctor, a lawyer, and then a priest.
Between 1904 and 1909, Alfred Binet co-wrote several plays for the Grand Guignol theatre with the playwright Andre de Lorde.
Alfred Binet studied the abilities of Valentine Dencausse, the most famous chiromancer in Paris in those days.
Alfred Binet had done a series of experiments to see how well chess players played when blindfolded.
Alfred Binet found that only some of the master chess players could play from memory and a few could play multiple games simultaneously without looking at the boards.
Alfred Binet concluded that extraordinary feats of memory such as blind chess playing could take a variety of mnemonic forms.
Alfred Binet recounted his experiments in a book entitled Psychologie des grands calculateurs et joueurs d'echecs.
Alfred Binet was one of the founding editors of L'annee psychologique, a yearly volume comprising original articles and reviews of the progress of psychology still in print.