Steven Pinker Quotes

By the early seventeenth century, a new consensus began to arise: the idea that man was born incompetent for society and remained so unless he was provided with 'education.'

We all learned how to walk and talk by interacting with our environment, with real goals and rewards.

Over tens and hundreds of thousands of years, we evolved to find certain things stimulating, and as very intelligent, civilized beings, we're enormously stimulated by problem solving and learning.

The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.

It was quite difficult to find a place to do what we wanted, namely to study the neurological basis of behaviour and especially learning and memory, which we were particularly interested in.

The first task in teaching is to bring to consciousness what the students already believe by virtue of their personal experiences about themselves and society.

Men get opinions as boys learn to spell, by reiteration chiefly.

The human being acquires a habit of learning. He learns to learn.

Because human nature evolved in an era before collective learning accelerated, we are all fitted to living in a world that does not change much after our formative years.

I think children learn through their parents.

The act of learning to read added an entirely new circuit to our hominid brain's repertoire. The long developmental process of learning to read deeply changed the very structure of that circuit's connections, which rewired the brain, which transformed the nature of human thought.

We can only know in the nervous system what we have known in behavior first.

I like to read and understand.

As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species' brain more than 6,000 years ago. That circuit evolved from a very simple mechanism for decoding basic information, like the number of goats in one's herd, to the present, highly elaborated reading brain.

There are no genes or areas in the brain devoted uniquely to reading. Rather, our ability to read represents our brain's protean capacity to learn something outside our repertoire by creating new circuits that connect existing circuits in a different way.

I am an educator and neuroscientist who studies how the brain learns to read and what happens when a young brain can't learn to read easily, as in the childhood learning challenge, developmental dyslexia.

Physical development fosters learning.

What is education but a process by which a person begins to learn how to learn?

Research indicates that, as long as we keep using our brains in an active way, we continue to build neural pathways as we get older. This gives us not only the ongoing potential for creative thought, but also an additional incentive for continuing to stretch ourselves.

Learning is a plant that grows in all climes.

Humans are more dependent on learning for survival than other species,We have no instincts that automatically find us food and shelter !

Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain.

The more one learns, the more he understands his ignorance.

Learning is more than absorbing facts, it is acquiring understanding.

Human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them