The Stuff Of Thoughts


The Stuff Of Thoughts 

By Steven Pinker (2008)

This is a book about language, the brain and unfortunately grammar.

The genealogy of language is truly fascinating. I mean, a gigantic living fossil record that lets you track down clues to how the human race has moved around the world, evolved culture and, which before reading this book I hadn’t really thought about, how our brains work. As Steven Pinker says in the title of this book “Language is a window into human nature”.


Language is a tool that helps your big curious brains to make sense of the world, our self and each other 

The main takeaway from this very dense, information-packed book is that you can see language as an interface between mankind and nature, a tool to helps us navigate and understand the world around us and or roll in it. 

According to Pinker, the physic world tightly is embedded in our language. 
  • A concept of space in our prepositions
  • A concept of matter in our nouns
  • A concept of time in out tenses
  • A concept of causality in out verbs
Understanding the intuitive physics of language helps us create the mental models we use to make sense of our lives. 

The more complex the society, the more complex and precise the language needs to be for us to be able to ride it. For example, the innovation of agriculture and the first cities made the development of writing and more advanced maths almost unavoidable.

Could the grammar exception that proves the rule be a cultural in-group check?

You could say we use language to domesticates the chaos around us. When we encounter something new and strange, we investigate and then claim it by naming the phenomena. And if its a problem we solve it and then lock the solution into a narrative, a story we can tell each other, like a metaphor or a proverb.

Over time, by a sort of natural selection, the fittest solutions will stick in the languages, become the convention, and the bad ones are forgotten. The surviving cultural stories help us to move on to the next thing. Just like science step by step takes the super out of the supernatural, language conquers chaos.


Wait a minute! Aren't this memes? Sounds like it to me! And if so, why didn't Pinker make the connection. I need to read some Dawkins.


Word magic helps us coop with chaos

There's still magic in the world of language. Taboo words or swearing ae basically a type of magic words that help us coop with chaos. For example, when you hit your thumb with a hammer or you miss your flight, chances are that your world briefly falls into chaos and by uttering a few really bad words you'll start to get it back on track again. 

The brain processes swearing in the lower regions, along with emotion and instinct. Lower when it comes the brain means older. All manuals have a sonic defence system. We scream when we get attacked. Ever accidentally step on your dog? But for humans instead of just a sound, it might come out as a taboo word.


Cost-book-benefit analysis

If you can see through the thick mist of grammar theory there are some truly fascinating pieces of the human nature puzzle to be found in “The stuff of thoughts”. What Steven Pinker does well is to paint a picture of the interplay nature-nurture of language. How the physical world and our bodies set the language boundaries and how our curious pattern pronoun brains explore and create order.

Buy 
->  Borrow
Burn 


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My "Stuff of thoughts" gap board 

Questions about language and human nature the needs further investigations 
  • Pattern recognition 
  • Social lubricant 
  • Collaboration
  • Taming chaos
  • Exploration & problem solving 
  • Memes / Knowledge bank 
  • Inspire and lead 
  • Non-verbal language, talk is cheap







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