The Stuff of Thought with Steven Pinker

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Why do we often avoid speaking our mind? Does swearing have an evolutionary function? What do linguistic taboos do to your brain? How are new words born? Acclaimed author of The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker is a self-confessed verbivore. To him language offers a window into the human mind and how it works. He joins Natasha Mitchell in a feature interview to argue there's nothing mere about semantics.
www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/stories/2008/2334232.htm   
 

Transcript

Natasha Mitchell: Natasha Mitchell joining you for All in the Mind on ABC Radio National. Happy Science Week.

 Back by popular demand today - an encore broadcast of one of the globe's great thinkers and hugely popular science writers. Harvard psychologist Professor Steven Pinker is my guest.

 His books, amongst others, include The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate. His latest tome The Stuff of Thought revisits his great passion—language—which he sees as an innate, biological instinct, and a window on to the mechanics of the mind.

 Classic wit of the words, George Carlin, who just died in June, would've loved his work...

 George Carlin Sometime during my life...sometime during my life, toilet paper became bathroom tissue. I wasn't notified of this, no one asked me if I agreed with it. Medicine became medication. The dump became the landfill. Partly cloudy became partly sunny, and constipation became occasional irregularity.

 Poor people used to live in slums, now the economically disadvantaged occupy substandard housing in the inner cities. And they're broke, they don't have a negative cash flow position, because a lot of them were fired. You know, fired; management wanted to curtail redundancies in the human resources area, so many people are no longer viable members...

 Steven Pinker: All of the classic poetic devices like alliteration, rhyme, metaphor, rhythm go into the crafting of obscene curses. Our language is filled with idioms that put taboo words to use without any discernible link to meaning, like 'bloody' and 'freakin' and 'pissing contest' would be an example. Can you say that on the radio?

 Natasha Mitchell: Yes, of course you can.

 Steven Pinker: Okay, not in this country.

 Natasha Mitchell: From why we swear, what taboo words do to your brain, to how we so often fail to speak our mind, and the unexpected birth of new words, even the linguistic phenomenon of the Sniglet. More later...

 The delights of language with Steven Pinker, much more than mere semantics, today on All in the Mind.

 Steven Pinker: People are fascinated by language. An enormous amount has been discovered about language in linguistics, in computer science, in psychology, in philosophy. Also it bears on human evolution, on political rhetoric, on the enjoyment of poetry and fiction, on the organisation of the brain. Language plays such a role in our lives, even sexuality, as we see in the language of swearing.

 Natasha Mitchell: You start The Stuff of Thought with a $3.5 billion battle over, in fact, the toppling of the World Trade Centre, which is one of countless linguistic problems with surprisingly enormous consequences. What's the story there?

 Steven Pinker: There was a debate between opposing lawyers in a set of insurance cases after 9/11 over whether the events in Manhattan that morning comprised one event or two events. It's an open semantic dispute because you could define an event in terms of a plan being carried out, namely al-Qaeda's plan to destroy the World Trade Centre, in which case there'd be one event; or you could define it in physical terms, in terms of salient changes to hunks of matter, in which case there was one building that was hit and then another building that was hit.

 The reason for the debate is that the lease-holder for the World Trade Centre held insurance policies that entitled him to $3.5 billion per destructive event, so if 9/11 was two events he stood to gain $7 billion, and if it was one event only $3.5 billion. So the value of a semantic distinction in this case can actually be given a precise number; $3.5 billion. One of the reasons there's still a hole in the ground in lower Manhattan instead of the so-called Freedom Tower is that it took the opposing lawyers years and years to iron this out.

 Natasha Mitchell: Did they turn to linguists?

 Steven Pinker: They ought to have. I think they reached a stalemate and they came up with a figure of $4.25 billion. I don't know if that means that they decided that it was one-and-a-third events or whether they just had staked out positions that defined the end points of the range and finally just haggled over an agreement that both could live with.

 Natasha Mitchell: But this really says that linguistic problems can have enormous consequences.

 Steven Pinker: Indeed, because we negotiate our social arrangements through language. It's also in issue in murder cases; who is responsible for someone's death is a very similar question to when do we use a causal verb. There's a difference between killing someone and causing them to die. That's a linguistic difference but I think it reflects a cognitive and moral difference over who we believe to be morally responsible. Just causing someone to die is not a crime but killing someone is.

 Bill Crosby: [from Bill Crosby Collection CD] You take an Englishman who's supposed to be very intelligent. English people speak the way they do because the suits they wear don't bend too good and they have to stand up straight. You see, their bottom lip is not as developed as ours. You see, their bottom lip...[makes exaggerated English accent sounds]. English people are conceited. You ever hear 'em? They love to listen to themselves, they say everything twice. Hear, hear!

 Natasha Mitchell: You make a key distinction between language itself and the language of thought. Some people think in fact language drives thought. So what's the distinction you're making there?

 Steven Pinker: Language drives thought in the sense that you acquire a lot of your thoughts from other people through language, but thought is not the same thing as language. Stretches of sound that we call sentences have meanings and those meanings themselves are part of a huge database of our understanding of the world and reality and ourselves. Language is just a tip of the iceberg of what's going on in the mind. This is a necessary assumption to explain how children learn language in the first place. They're born, clearly, without language, they've got to learn it, they can't be learning to think at the same time as they're learning to speak because how would they learn to speak if they had no ability whatsoever to think? Experiments show that babies surely think about the world, as do non-human animals. Likewise, as adults, once we have a language we can translate from one language to another, we can identify two sentences that have the same meaning, we can identify a single sentence that has two meanings; such as 'visiting professors can be boring' which can either mean that the professors are boring or the visits are boring. In order for a given sentence to have two meanings there have to be meanings that are separate from the sentences themselves, and we often know that words can be inadequate to the thoughts that we have. We struggle to put our thoughts into words. And in experiments you find, say, the human memory very quickly sloughs off the exact wording of a passage of prose and the only thing that stays is something much more abstract; the gist or content of what you're read.

Natasha Mitchell: A great way where our language doesn't actually reflect what we're thinking is a subject of great fascination to you...you're struck by just how indirect our language can be in so many social interactions. 'Do you want to come up and see my etchings?' is just one example of that, that's just the tip of the iceberg, isn't it.

 Steven Pinker: Indeed, very often we don't just blurt out our intentions in so many words but we veil them in innuendo and count on our listeners to read between the lines to figure out what we really mean. There are others, like a veiled bribe, 'Gee officer, is there some way to take care of the traffic ticket here without going to court or doing any paperwork?' Even polite requests, 'If you could pass the salt that would be brilliant.' When you think about it, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense but we instantly recognise it as a polite request. I think it's because language has to do two things at once; it has to convey content, a promise, a proposition, a command; and at the same time it's got to ratify or change a relationship type because people aren't just modems downloading information into each other's brains. We always have a social relationship with the person we're talking to and the content of our conversation can affect that relationship.

 Natasha Mitchell: So is this a linguistic case of politeness, of saving face, in effect, that we don't literally speak our mind?

 Steven Pinker: Very much, and what politeness largely consists of is maintaining a relationship type, in order to reassure the listener that you want the damn salt but you don't think of them as some kind of underling, you veil it as a hypothetical, like 'if you could pass the salt that would be awesome', or a question 'do you think you could pass the salt?' and other ways of achieving both goals at once.

 Natasha Mitchell: There's an incredible inefficiency in indirect speech, though, isn't there.

 Steven Pinker: Yes, there's not only the extra words and the beating around the bush, and there's also some chance that your message will be lost on your listener.

 Excerpt from Seinfeld:

 JERRY: You're still thinking about this?

 GEORGE: She invites me up at twelve o'clock at night for coffee, and I don't go up. 'No thank you. I don't want coffee. It keeps me up.' People this stupid shouldn't be allowed to live. I can't imagine what she must think of me.

 ELAINE: It's all in your head. All she knows is she had a good time. I think you should call her.

 GEORGE: She's gonna think I'm too needy. Women don't wanna see need. They want a take-charge guy, a colonel, a Kaiser, a tsar.

 ELAINE: All she'll think is that you like her.

 Steven Pinker: And in fact at times that ambiguity is the reason that we resort to indirect speech such as in tendering a bribe to a policeman or a sexual come-on to a partner who may or may not be interested, especially in cases where the listener's intentions are uncertain, as in you don't know whether you're going to have an honest cop who's going to arrest you for bribery or a dishonest cop who will accept the bribe; or whether you have a willing partner who will come up for sex or an unwilling one, in which case you couldn't pretend to be friends anymore. So there is a kind of calculated vagueness in some of these.

 Natasha Mitchell: I was really struck by one of your comments and that is, 'language is not just a window on to human nature but a fistula, an open wound through which our innards are exposed to an infectious world'. That, in a sense, says language is at once both deeply social and also a deeply private affair.

 Steven Pinker: That's right, and I think it comes from a very profound and paradoxical feature of information and rationality, namely it's not always good to have more information. Sometimes you're better off if you don't know something. The Godfather made famous the phrase, 'I'll make him an offer he can't refuse.' The humour of that is if you don't understand the language in which the threat was issued you're actually better off because then you can't be compelled, by your own self-interest, to do what the threatener wants.

 There are many other cases where you're better off not hearing something. If, for example, a prestigious job opens up, if someone asks, 'Are you interested?' if you say 'yes' you're setting yourself up for humiliation if you don't get the job, if you say 'no' you might take yourself out of the running, and if you say 'no comment' then that's a confession that the answer is 'yes' because otherwise why would you have to say 'no comment'. Likewise, politicians when they say 'no comment' realise that often either answer will get them into trouble and they would have been better off not having been asked the question in the first place.

 Natasha Mitchell: One of the most delicious pleasures in all great literature is of course metaphor, but we spend a lot of time also talking in metaphor, and this particularly fascinates you. Why?

 Steven Pinker: Metaphor saturates our language, as in what I just said, 'metaphor saturates our language', as if language is a sponge or a container and the constructions are a kind of fluid that fills them. It's almost hard to find a passage of everyday speech that doesn't contain metaphor. 'My spirits are up but the economy is down', 'I had to force myself to get out of bed this morning to drag myself to work,' all of these things involve quite bizarre images if you were to take them literally.

 It raises the question; for all of the brilliant abstraction that the human mind is capable of—philosophy and law and science and government and so on—is it all a coopting of mental structures that are much more concrete and physical; and is metaphor...not in the sense of a literary ornament but metaphor in the sense of these unconscious analogies, metaphors that fill our speech, is that a fundamental mechanism that allows us to apply Stone Age ways of thinking to abstract subject matters?

 Natasha Mitchell: Some people think that metaphors have really no special place in the mind, that they just would have been dubbed semantic fossils or ornamental flourishes of languages. You think they're killjoys.

 Steven Pinker: Yes, well, I set up two extreme positions. One of them, when you just alluded to the killjoy position, was that metaphor was alive in the mind of the coiner back in the mists of history but that we've been dumbly memorising them ever since without ever thinking about what they refer to. That clearly has to be true some of the time because we use mixed metaphors, like 'when you open a can of worms they always come home to roost', where the person who uttered that couldn't possibly have thought through to what those metaphors allude to.

 There are dead metaphors, like 'the situation is coming to a head'. I don't think anyone would use that if they really knew where the metaphor arose, namely the build up of pus in a pimple. And there are inadvertently tasteless metaphors, like I heard a radio psychotherapist once say, 'For many patients, cancer can be a growth experience.' Bad choice of words. So clearly not all metaphors are processed as metaphors. At the other extreme there's the position that George Lakoff...

 Natasha Mitchell: You are thick in the linguistic wars with George Lakoff, aren't you.

 Steven Pinker: Yes. Lakoff I think stakes out the other position, namely that all abstract thought is metaphorical, the way we think about the world depends on the metaphors that get stamped into our brain by sheer repetition...

 Natasha Mitchell: He thinks that we think entirely through metaphor.

 Steven Pinker: Well, other than actual physical experiences which we're born with, sights and sounds and emotions and bodily sensations, pretty much everything other than those he believes is metaphorical; that we actually at some level think of language as a container and its constructions as a kind of fluid. Or we think of love as a journey when we say things like 'look how far we've come', 'it's been a rocky road', 'don't bale out now', with implications that whoever controls the metaphors controls people's political understanding, which is why he has been a consultant to the Democratic Party in the United States, trying to advise them on how to recapture metaphors in political discourse.

 So those are the two extremes, and clearly the truth has to be somewhere in between. So I think Lakoff has uncovered a very profound fact about our psychology, namely that we can often effortlessly go from a concrete image to a more abstract way of thinking, but I think he takes it too far.

 Natasha Mitchell: You think metaphors provide a way, as you put it, 'to eff the ineffable'.

 Steven Pinker: Yes, there are many things that we can't express very easily through words because there are emotions, there are creative thought processes that are very difficult to express in ordinary language. But skilled writers can use metaphor to do their best to push the outside of the envelope of what language can express, to try to convey what it's like to have a mathematical insight come looming into your mind if you're a mathematician, or compose a melody if you're a composer, or to be in the throes of an unspeakable sexual urge. Great writers like Nabokov, Ian McEwan and so on are able to press language into service by the use of metaphor.

 George Carlin: We have more ways to describe dirty words than we actually have dirty words; dirty, filthy, foul, vile, vulgar, coarse, in poor taste, unseemly, street-talk, gutter-talk, locker room language, barracks-talk, bawdy, naughty, saucy, raunchy, rude, crude, lewd, lascivious, indecent, profane, obscene, blue, off-colour, risquй, suggestive, cursing, cussing, swearing, and all I could think of was...

 Natasha Mitchell: Let's come to one of my favourite topics and it's perhaps the most entertaining chapter in The Stuff of Thought, the semantics of swearing and taboo language. What's the delight for you in taking on rude words?

 Steven Pinker: Part of it is a strictly linguistic puzzle, that a lot of our obscene expressions make no sense literally and have a bizarre syntax.

 Natasha Mitchell: That's your excuse!

 Steven Pinker: I insist that I'm not actually swearing, I'm writing about swearing. That's why we have quotation marks. Also it's a strange psychological and even biological phenomenon that, for example, when some misfortune befalls us, if we slice our thumb together with the bagel or knock a glass of wine into our laps, the topic of our conversation abruptly switches to theology or excretion or sexuality. And of course there's the phenomenon of people who can't seem to get a sentence out without three or four uses of the F word or the word 'bloody' which used to be highly inflammatory but...

 Natasha Mitchell: Yes, I did note you pointed out that Australians were particularly adept at that.

 Steven Pinker: Yes, it's sometimes called the great Australian adjective. Now of course it's much more acceptable, but in, say, 1913 when Pygmalion the Shaw play was first performed and Eliza Doolittle said, 'Not bloody likely,' it was meant to cause a sensation among her fictitious tea party companions, but it also caused a sensation among theatre audiences who'd never heard that word uttered in public before. Of course times have changed.

 Natasha Mitchell: But you point to what you suggest is the illogic and hypocrisy of linguistic taboos. Why hypocrisy?

 Steven Pinker: Everyone knows what the words are, you can put a fig leaf over the word with a few asterisks, even though by historical standards we have unprecedented freedom of speech...you can call the leader of your country a liar and a moron and you won't be thrown in a dungeon or burned at the stake, but if you use certain words for excretion and sexuality then the full might of the government will come crashing down on you. At least in America, radio and TV stations can almost be put out of business by the ruinous fines that have recently been written into law.

 Natasha Mitchell: But in fact legislators in the States have really struggled, haven't they, to linguistically define or encapsulate the full extent of swear words.

 Steven Pinker: Yes. In fact I reproduce verbatim a bill that was introduced in congress called the Clean Airwaves Act which tried to close a loophole in the existing radio and television regulations. At one point when Bono from the U2 group said, 'This is really freakin' brilliant,' on the air (although he didn't use the word 'freakin'!) legally it was okay because it wasn't technically referring to sexuality. A congressman introduced a bill to close this loophole that is so filthy that you couldn't read the bill over the air. In fact the bill would make it illegal to read itself over the air.

 He did his best in his grammatically illiterate way to stipulate all of the bad words and all the contexts in which you couldn't use them. I just downloaded it directly from the US government website and reproduced it in the book. I point out that the irony is that he tried to list every part of speech, the participle, the gerund and compound to rule out every possible case, and he left out the actual one that was the bone of contention in the Bono case, namely in 'freakin brilliant'...'freakin' is an adverb, and adverb was the one part of speech he forgot to include in his list.

 Natasha Mitchell: So it was a grammatically incorrect piece of legislation anyway. Beautiful, beautiful. Steve, you've looked to the brain for an explanation. What do we know about how swearing engages the brain?

 Steven Pinker: Swearing taps into different parts of the brain than ordinary articulate speech. This has been known for quite some time because often neurological patients who suffer a stroke to the parts of the brain that underlie language and become aphasic, unable to speak fluently, have no trouble with swearing. They can swear like a sailor even though they can't put an articulate sentence together. Neuro imaging studies have shown that taboo words light up primitive parts of the brain like the amygdala which responds to threatening stimuli, like an angry face or a dangerous animal.

 Also the right hemisphere which we know plays less of a role in articulate language...typically, strokes to the right hemisphere don't make a person aphasic, but the right hemisphere seems to be more involved in swearing than the left hemisphere. It suggests that basically taboo words activate brain areas that are associated with negative emotion, disgust, with hatred, with revulsion at sexual depravity, with awe and fear of deities, and all of the topics that get turned into swear words in different languages all have something to do with strongly felt emotion.

 Natasha Mitchell: That said, though, why would any word associated with sex that's been turned into a swear word...I love the fact that we can have a conversation about swearing without actually swearing, but anyway...why would a word associated with sex that's been turned into a swear word present a sort of negative challenge to the brain?

 Steven Pinker: There are sexual taboos and hang-ups in all human cultures, and it's not surprising to a biologist because sexuality is the very stuff of evolution, although since the 60s we've had a romantic view of sex as a wholesome pleasure between two mutually consenting adults. But that characterises a fraction of the sexual encounters of the human species because there's also exploitation and cuckoldry and rape and harassment and child abuse, and many instances of sexuality are not so benign. There are parents who might have an arranged marriage in mind, there's the community that has to figure out what to do with the babies that might come from a consensual sexual act, there's a community that worries about the sexual competition and posturing that accompany sexual freedom. So it's a highly charged emotional activity, and it's not surprising that words for the activity should also carry an emotional charge.

 Natasha Mitchell: So your sense is that swearing and our response to it emerges from a deep and ancient part of the brain.

 Steven Pinker: Yes, from the neurobiological work that suggests that swearing taps into structures like the amygdala, the basal ganglia and even the right hemisphere which is more involved in negative emotion than the left hemisphere, suggests that there is some primitive grounding in it, especially in the one kind of swearing, the one that I call cathartic swearing, that is when you suddenly injure yourself or make an error and you blurt out a word for sex or a deity or excretion. We have a lot of euphemisms like 'shucks', 'golly', 'geez' and 'fiddlesticks'.

 But I think that they are rooted in what biologists call the rage circuit, which is found throughout mammals, namely when an animal is suddenly injured or confined it will erupt in a furious struggle accompanied by an ear-splitting screech or howl. So if you've ever sat down on your pet cat you'll be familiar with this reflex. In the case of humans we don't just let out a yelp but we articulate it with a word filled with negative emotion that we ordinarily inhibit ourselves from making. So I think it's a peculiar hybrid of a human language and a primitive mammalian reflex.

 Natasha Mitchell: And yet we've become incredibly creative in swearing, haven't we. So what about arrangements like 'abso-bloody-lutely'? And it can actually express great joy, a good bout of swearing.

 Steven Pinker: Indeed, there's a lot of poetry that goes into another kind of swearing; abuse swearing, where we tap the emotional power of swear words to intimidate or humiliate someone.

 Natasha Mitchell: The story of how new words come into being is particularly interesting in your book The Stuff of Thought, and there's a conversation about Sniglets, for example.

 Steven Pinker: A Sniglet is a term introduced by an American comedian, Rich Hall, for a word that should exist but doesn't or a concept that needs a word. So a Sniglet, by the way, is an example of itself, although I think he got the concept from John Lloyd and Douglas Adams, who had a delightful book called The Meaning of Liff, and he coined hundreds of them, like 'perpetate' which is to take an item in a supermarket and put it in your shopping cart and then decide you don't want it and put it on some random other shelf; like a 'hextable' for the one record in someone's collection that convinces you that you could never go out with them. For years I was worried that my copy of...

 Natasha Mitchell: That's so true. They found your Phil Collins...

 Steven Pinker: Yes, exactly, my copy of Gordon Lightfoot Greatest Hits would scare away any potential romantic partner. Or a 'lamlash' which is the folder on hotel dressing tables full of astoundingly dull information. But it shows that you can have far more...

 Natasha Mitchell: None of these words seem to stick though, do they, and that's your point.

 Steven Pinker: They don't stick, that's right, exactly, that most new coinages don't stick, and that the ones that do are often completely unpredictable. I don't think anyone could have predicted that the term for bulk email would be 'spam' based on the Monty Python skit.

 Excerpt from Monty Python skit Spam:

 MAN: Morning!

 WAITRESS: Morning!

 MAN: What've you got then?

 WAITRESS: Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam spam spam spam spam spam baked beans spam spam spam and spam...or lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a mornay sauce garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and spam.

 WIFE: Have you got anything without spam in it?

 WAITRESS: Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.

 WIFE: I don't want any spam...

 Steven Pinker: This silly mindless repetition reminded some hacker in the 1980s of identical postings to a news group, and the usage escaped from the community of computer programmers to the population at large. And I think that typifies the history of words, namely not only are there concepts that need a word that somehow remain nameless, they come out of nowhere, they catch on, it's a kind of popular fad or craze that people can't see coming and that follow some kind of chaotic dynamics.

 Natasha Mitchell: Is there any way we can predict whether a new word will take hold?

 Steven Pinker: I think not, because there are people who try to do it. Dialectologists every year will nominate their ten words of the year, and you go back after a decade and generally none of them catch on. If you go back to the early 90s there were words like 'Infobahn' for the internet and 'information superhighway', Al Gore made that popular, but you'd feel rather silly saying, 'I need to log on to the information superhighway' these days.

 Natasha Mitchell: I want to come to this final question and that is one of the criticisms of your arguments in the past has been...particularly your argument that we're born into the world with a mind that's already shaped to some extent by our genetic heritage, is that it's a constraining sort of view of human nature and the possibilities for us as we enter the world and become adults. So I'm intrigued by your argument in this book that language in fact offers us the clearest window on how we might transcend our cognitive limitations. What are you getting at there?

 Steven Pinker: Clearly we have done unprecedented things with respect to the history of our species. We figured out how a lot of the world works through science, we have remarkably productive economies through economic institutions, we have governance structures that more or less work in large parts of the world, liberal democracy. How do we get these from a backdrop of minds that can only count up to three, that are habitually prone to feuding and warfare, that are filled with ignorance and superstition? I think we do it partly by this mechanism of metaphor, that is we take mental structures that were designed to reason about throwing rocks and dragging branches along the ground and apply them to abstract domains, which is why so much of the language of science is metaphorical; evolution as a kind of selection, genetic material as a code.

 We take everyday concepts and give them new meanings because we can carry over some of their structure. The ability to assemble complex thoughts out of simple thoughts by words, exactly analogous to how we assemble sentences out of words using rules in language allows us to build bigger and bigger cognitive structures or more and more complex ideas out of simple ideas. And then I think we also have a social apparatus that specifically inhibits some of our social instincts, like in nepotism or in cronyism and dominance. We stipulate exactly where we can and can't apply those and get social institutions that transcend the historic limitations of people hiring their friends or their brother-in-law—exerting sheer brute force strength over others.

 Our institutions like science, democracy, journalism, government hinge on rewiring our social instincts, not making them go away, as we see that we're apt to backslide into superstition and nepotism and cronyism whenever we don't make a concerted effort to overcome them. We also see that the ancestry of our concrete ideas in education where we have to teach abstract new concepts by analogy and metaphor, and to debug misunderstandings by saying to pupils, 'Make sure you don't take this analogy too literally.' So our heritage is still visible in the struggle that we always have to avoid backsliding.

 Natasha Mitchell: So is language our way out of that? Does it save us from ourselves, in effect, in our instinctual ways?

 Steven Pinker: Yes, and not just language but what language reveals. That is, the metaphor that we see in language I think is like analogical thinking that we put into scientific understanding. The combinatorial rules that we see in language are like the combinatorial rules that build up complicated thoughts. So it's not just that we negotiate these new social arrangements and new knowledge via language, which of course we do, but in addition language gives us a hint as to what's going on beneath language, which has to be at least as complicated as language.

 Natasha Mitchell: It's a bit of a magical mystery tour really of our most uniquely human faculty, I think. You must have had a lot of fun writing it. It's been a delight to have you on ABC Radio National and on All in the Mind. Thank you for joining me.

 Steven Pinker: Thanks for having me.

 Excerpt from Monty Python skit Spam:

 WAITRESS: Urgghh!

 WIFe: What do you mean 'Urgghh'? I don't like spam!

 VIKINGS: [singing] Spam spam spam. Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!

 Natasha Mitchell: Those mischief-makers, Monty Python.

 And If you're passing through Melbourne this Monday 18th August at 6.30 pm - come along to an All in the Mind event for National Science Week.

 Are markets moral? Is our brain evolutionarily geared for modern capitalism? Does money make us happy? And the rise of neuroeconomics and more...

 With two absolute corker guests - Dr Michael Shermer, this year's touring guest for Science Week. Founder of The Skeptics Society in the USA and popular columnist with Scientific American.

 And Stephen Mayne, shareholder activist, journalist and founder of crikey.com.au

 These two won't be shy. More info about the event on All in the Mind's website...alongwith the audio and transcript of the show ...And...an extended podcast version of today's conversation too.

 I'm Natasha Mitchell - catch you next week.

Guests

Steven Pinker
Johnstone Family Professor
Department of Psychology
Harvard University
http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/