Thought Exploratorium

Sometimes I wonder if Steven Pinker’s curly gray hair is really an extension of his brain. Here he’s talking about language and the hints it gives towards figuring out how the mind and brain work. In reference to the post on Jeff Hawkins’ approach to a theory of the brain, I hope Hawkins also integrates the conclusions found in linguistics that Pinker talks about here.

Towards the beginning of this talk, he seems to go on about seemingly boring oddities of language, but just stick with it. The talk gets pretty good about a third of the way in, where he starts talking about hints of a meta-language that governs our use of language that seems to focus on a fairly simple set of concepts. He referred to this language as “mentalese” or the language of the mind.