The Stuff of Thought
Language as a Window into Human Nature
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Narrated by:
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Dean Olsher
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By:
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Steven Pinker
About this listen
Now, in The Stuff of Thought, Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best: language and human nature. The result is a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. What does swearing reveal about our emotions? Why does innuendo disclose something about relationships? Pinker reveals how our use of prepositions and tenses taps into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and how our nouns and verbs speak to our notions of matter. Even the names we give our babies have important things to say about our relations to our children and to society.
With his signature wit and style, Pinker takes on scientific questions like whether language affects thought, as well as forays into everyday life: why is bulk e-mail called spam, and how do romantic comedies get such mileage out of the ambiguities of dating?
The Stuff of Thought is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable work that will appeal to fans of everything from The Selfish Gene and Blink to Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
©2007 Steven Pinker (P)2007 Penguin Audio, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. and Books on Tape. All rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...
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- By Ivan on 07-05-11
By: Michael Kaplan, and others
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Out of Our Heads
- You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness
- By: Alva Noe
- Narrated by: Jay Snyder
- Length: 6 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Alva Noë is one of a new breed - part philosopher, part cognitive scientist, part neuroscientist - who are radically altering the study of consciousness by asking difficult questions and pointing out obvious flaws in the current science. In Out of Our Heads, he restates and reexamines the problem of consciousness, and then proposes a startling solution: Do away with the 200-year-old paradigm that places consciousness within the confines of the brain.
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A bold, yet ultimately unsupported, hypothesis
- By Keith Pyne-Howarth on 01-17-10
By: Alva Noe
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Louder Than Words
- The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning
- By: Benjamin K. Bergen
- Narrated by: Benjamin K. Bergen
- Length: 8 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Whether it’s brusque, convincing, fraught with emotion, or dripping with innuendo, language is fundamentally a tool for conveying meaning - a uniquely human magic trick in which you vibrate your vocal cords to make your innermost thoughts pop up in someone else’s mind. You can use it to talk about all sorts of things - from your new labradoodle puppy to the expansive gardens at Versailles, from Roger Federer’s backhand to things that don’t exist at all, like flying pigs.
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Fun But Technical--Glad I Got It On Sale
- By Gillian on 05-22-17
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Freedom Evolves
- By: Daniel C. Dennett
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 11 hrs and 21 mins
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Can there be freedom and free will in a deterministic world? Renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett emphatically answers "yes!" Using an array of provocative formulations, Dennett sets out to show how we alone among the animals have evolved minds that give us free will and morality. Weaving a richly detailed narrative, Dennett explains in a series of strikingly original arguments - drawing upon evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, economics, and philosophy - that far from being an enemy of traditional explorations of freedom, morality, and meaning, the evolutionary perspective can be an indispensable ally.
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I knew I was going to like this book
- By Gary on 05-30-14
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The Mother Tongue
- By: Bill Bryson
- Narrated by: Stephen McLaughlin
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
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With dazzling wit and astonishing insight, Bill Bryson - the acclaimed author of The Lost Continent - brilliantly explores the remarkable history, eccentricities, resilience, and sheer fun of the English language. From the first descent of the larynx into the throat (why you can talk but your dog can't) to the fine lost art of swearing, Bryson tells the fascinating, often uproarious story of an inadequate, second-rate tongue of peasants that developed into one of the world's largest growth industries.
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More satire than history
- By Barbara Kindle Customer on 12-18-15
By: Bill Bryson
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A Most Elegant Equation
- Euler’s Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics
- By: David Stipp
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 5 hrs and 2 mins
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Bertrand Russell wrote that mathematics can exalt "as surely as poetry". This is especially true of one equation: ei(pi) + 1 = 0, the brainchild of Leonhard Euler, the Mozart of mathematics. More than two centuries after Euler's death, it is still regarded as a conceptual diamond of unsurpassed beauty. Called Euler's identity, or God's equation, it includes just five numbers but represents an astonishing revelation of hidden connections.
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Good treatment of the subject
- By Kindle Customer on 04-09-18
By: David Stipp
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The Pun Also Rises
- How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics
- By: John Pollack
- Narrated by: Pete Larkin
- Length: 4 hrs and 57 mins
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The Pun Also Rises is an authoritative yet playful exploration of a practice that is common, in one form or another, to virtually every language on earth. At once entertaining and educational, this engaging book answers fundamental questions: Just what is a pun, and why do people make them? How did punning impact the development of human language, and how did that drive creativity and progress? And why, after centuries of decline, does the pun still matter?
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Punderful Little Book
- By B. Lane on 01-10-13
By: John Pollack
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The Mind Club
- Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why It Matters
- By: Daniel M. Wegner, Kurt Gray
- Narrated by: David Marantz
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Nothing seems more real than the minds of other people. When you consider what your boss is thinking or whether your spouse is happy, you are admitting them into the "mind club". It's easy to assume other humans can think and feel, but what about a cow, a computer, a corporation? What kinds of minds do they have? Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray are award-winning psychologists who have discovered that minds - while incredibly important - are a matter of perception.
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Who is the self in me? Am I part of something bigger?
- By Philomath on 03-24-16
By: Daniel M. Wegner, and others
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You Are Now Less Dumb
- How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself
- By: David McRaney
- Narrated by: Don Hagen
- Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins
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You Are Now Less Dumb is grounded in the idea that we all believe ourselves to be objective observers of reality - except we’re not. But that's okay, because our delusions keep us sane. Expanding on this premise, McRaney provides eye-opening analyses of 15 more ways we fool ourselves every day. This smart and highly entertaining audiobook will be wowing listeners for years to come.
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Not a lot of guidance
- By A. Yoshida on 02-08-14
By: David McRaney
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Riveted
- The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe
- By: Jim Davies
- Narrated by: Matthew Josdal
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Professor Jim Davies's fascinating and highly accessible book, Riveted, reveals the evolutionary underpinnings of why we find things compelling. Drawing on work from philosophy, anthropology, religious studies, psychology, economics, computer science, and biology, Davies offers a comprehensive explanation to show that in spite of the differences between the many things that we find compelling, they have similar effects on our minds and brains.
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Fun and excellent listen!
- By Alejandro Franco on 04-13-18
By: Jim Davies
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In The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich draws on cutting-edge research in anthropology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary biology to explore these questions and more. He illuminates the origins and evolution of family structures, marriage, and religion, and the profound impact these cultural transformations had on human psychology. Mapping these shifts through ancient history and late antiquity, Henrich reveals that the most fundamental institutions of kinship and marriage changed dramatically under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church.
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Lots of mispronounced words
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What listeners say about The Stuff of Thought
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Roman
- 03-20-20
Much more about language than about thought
It is nice that the author delves into logic and linguistic rules and exceptions, and the consequential influence on the thought. However the presentation is quite arcane.
It may be of interest to a linguist, and as a person that never had much interest in linguistics, for me it was an interesting insight into what linguists are up to. I still reserve a right to the opinion that most of this is an academic endeavor which reached the point of exceedingly diminishing returns to anyone but specialists long time ago. However, new PhDs must to be awarded for something...
I would like it better if the book took the opposite approach: from a generalization of thought process to underlying language constructs. Then delving into exceptions, etc.
Just my subjective opinion, many people found the current way of presentation exciting.
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Overall
- Art Maker
- 05-06-08
Challenging listening
This audiobook is challenging though fascinating listening. The exploration of how we use language to represent our social, psychic and physical worlds is well researched and often surprising and amusing. It's rather difficult to keep one's concentration given the complexity of many of the ideas and theories presented here. I've often wished I was reading the actual text, to see the words and technical jargon on the printed page. There do seem to be gaps in the narrative, and I plan to go to the hard copy version of the book now that I've finished listening. Worth the effort, though, for the insights it offers on how we process language to negotiate the worlds we live in.
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9 people found this helpful
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- James
- 02-15-23
Enlightening dissection of how we talk
Pinker dissects the psychology of euphemisms, face saving, polite indirectness, and many other quirks of language that point to often-unconscious motivations and social alculations.
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- Rameshddrr
- 07-31-19
Narrator in a hurry to finish the book
great book. Slower speed will help! Ideas are complex and needs time to comprehend. Had to reduce the speed to read it. Have to keep changing the listening speeds.
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- Hermanubis
- 10-26-22
Mmmeeehhhhhhh
Nothing compares to the Blank Slate, or The better Angels bro, How The Mind Works would be 3rd place on my list at least.This was garbage in comparison from every angle, but again, I’m just a regular guy with a 110 for an IQ so,… maybe more capable minds can extract much more from it
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Overall
- Miroslaw
- 09-12-09
Escaping the Cave
Steven Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought" is about language. Yet - it is not just about the language. It's a deep philosophical tractate about the very nature of mind and its interaction with the world.
"Language is a window into human nature, exposing deep and universal features of our thoughts and feelings. The thoughts and feelings cannot be equated with the words themselves"
The central theme of the book is an attempt to uncover the abstract layer that our mind uses to think, to perceive, to be conscious. Going from the concepts of innate words, through polysemy, metaphors, names, and language games we play - Steven slowly makes evident the existence of deeper, more abstract, but also more precise layer of the human mind. There are numerous examples that illustrate the specific reflection of this abstract "stuff" in our language. Equally amazing is to find reflections of concepts of space, time and causality in the forms of our language.
I'm glad to notice that Pinker goes far beyond the biological interpretation of our mind. When you read "The stuff of thought" you have the impression that this author finally writes about the software our brain runs. To me - this software is the "stuff", although Pinker does not formulate such thesis.
Here is a small weakness of the book - while Pinker convinces the reader to his main argument - and the reader expects to learn more about "the stuff of thought" - he suddenly comes short on this subject.
But the book ends with fantastic chapter "Escaping the Cave" where the cave is Platon's metaphorical cave. The language is our cave, but it also can help us to escape this cave. Here lies its strength, beauty and power...
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24 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Patricia B Tripoli
- 07-17-11
Not A Book To Listen To
I did not get beyond the first hour of listening to this book. While the subject matter is very interesting to me, and it was written in a fashion to be easy to understand, as well as the narrator was doing a good job ...it should be read. It is enough like a text that listening just doesn't cut it.
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- James Mart
- 07-27-17
What a fantastic introduction to linguistics.
Pinker's writing is wonderfully precise, informative, and hilarious. Although I wish Pinker narrated it himself, the narrator did a great job!
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- Versh
- 07-13-16
An interesting tour of the mind with language
Pinker once again uses plenty of analogies with fresh metaphors to keep a clear explanations at a comfortable pace. The chapters seemlessly blend multiple angles for each topic, often so comprehensively, this book could be the introduction for a course of computational theory applied to language aquistion or something. Overall, I especially liked the balance of formal scholarly reference and casual levity, it kept the ever-changing train of thought accessible.
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- Maggie Kaye
- 11-07-15
Excellent!
A fantastic book for anyone interested in why we speak the way we do. Great introduction to linguistics.
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