 | I have found Steven Pinker's works to be uneven. His How the Mind Works is perhaps his best work, addressing consciousness largely at the perceptual level. This current book approaches the mind from a physico-linguistic standpoint, dealing with words not primarily as tags for conceptual abstractions, but rather as mental nexuses which are processed physically in various parts of the brain. For example, he studies how expletives and other taboo words not only have objective referents as universals, but how they also tend to hijack our emotional circuits and, if we do not exert focused mental self-control, cause us to act as outraged mammals rather than rational animals.
I highly recommend Pinker's appearance on BookTV which will be repeated Sunday, December 23, 5:15AM. If you watch the talk, you'll be sold on the book.
Ted Keer |
The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker
