Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals, and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots; they have reactions like ours that indicate that someone's home.Steven Pinker
The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero.Steven Pinker
You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain.Steven Pinker
I think the reason that swearing is both so offensive and so attractive is that it is a way to push people's emotional buttons, and especially their negative emotional buttons. Because words soak up emotional connotations and are processed involuntarily by the listener, you can't will yourself not to treat the word in terms of what it means.Steven Pinker
Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?Steven Pinker
Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.Steven Pinker
Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.Steven Pinker
Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?Steven Pinker
But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses.Steven Pinker
The 9/11 strikes left an indelible impact on our minds, but in relative terms, the scale of casualties actually wasn't all that high.Steven Pinker
