Not long ago, Steven Pinker appeared on “The Colbert Report.” He managed to explain the functioning of the human brain to Stephen Colbert in only five words: “Brain cells fire in patterns.”
Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, appeared in Science Center B Tuesday evening (Oct. 23) to talk about his new book, “The Stuff of Thought.”
Fortunately, his audience there was able to take in more than five words at a time.
He was interviewed by Harvard College Professor Marc Hauser as part of the “Ideas on the Fringe” series of conversations, meant to highlight the work of faculty members “on the edge” of their discipline.
Their dialogue touched on a number of topics, including why human beings swear, the language of bribery, and how one memory can trigger another.
Pinker and Hauser began by talking about a challenge inherent in Pinker’s study of language as an entrée into the larger world of the study of human thought: At one level, language is the “crucial model system for thinking about the cognitive sciences,” as Pinker put it. Language is so essential to being human that studying language is an excellent approach to the study of human cognition.
But at another level, linguistics, as a discipline, has become so specialized, and so focused on structure at the expense of meaning, that it has become somewhat detached from usefulness to the cognitive sciences.
Marc Hauser (left) and Steven Pinker talk about the human brain. Their dialogue touched on a number of topics, including why human beings swear, the language of bribery, and how one memory can trigger another. 
