Word: pinker
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...shoulder-length hair bouncing, Steve Pinker strides into the lecture hall like a rock star taking center stage. He flings his leather jacket over the back of a chair, fingers some chords on an electronic keyboard and flicks on his microphone. Over the next hour and a half, Pinker, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will treat 325 undergraduates to a series of demonstrations highlighting design glitches in that evanescent thing we call the mind...
...starts by projecting stereograms--two-dimensional images that produce three-dimensional illusions--onto a big movie screen. As the students stare, a pattern of chain-saw-wielding teddy bears magically gives rise to the image of a large, headless bear that seems to hover in space. Sometimes, explains Pinker, 43, the mind "sees" things that are not really there...
...book, immodestly titled How the Mind Works (Norton; $29.95), Pinker suggests an intriguing if highly controversial answer. The mind, he says, is like an ancient, jerry-built computer program made up of dozens of specialized "modules," each honed by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years of evolution. There are modules for stereo vision and manual dexterity, for understanding numbers and grammatical speech, for sexual jealousy and romantic love. Don't think of them as "detachable, snap-in components," he cautions. They're not visible to the naked eye "like the rump steak on the supermarket cow display...
...class requires three books: The Language Instinct, Stephen Pinker's bestseller on language called "A brilliant, witty and altogether satisfying book" by the New York Times; "The Story of English," a comprehensive survey of the history of English and a text on dialects...
Although it might be rude to point out, language is not a sacred entity. The French language did not descend from the heavens in its present incarnation. As Steven Pinker, a professor at M.I.T., explained in his New Republic article entitled "Grammar Puss," language is a continually evolving conglomeration of sounds and symbols inherited and assimilated from countless cultures...