Who would have thought a psychology professor could do stand-up? Formerly a professor of psychology at MIT, Steven Pinker is not only such a good writer, but he is also such a dynamic and entertaining speaker that one can see why Harvard would want to acquire him for its faculty. 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. Read an excellent technical review of the work at Babel's Dawn blog by Edmund Blair Bolles - but keep in mind that the book is less technical in presentation than the review.I cannot highly enough recommend Pinker's appearance on BookTV. The topic may sound difficult, yet Pinker is not only crystal clear, he is also laugh out loud funny. Click here to see him speek for 45 minutes, commercial free. If you watch the talk, you'll be sold on the book.
Here is Steven Pinker at the Authors@Google conference:
