Steven Pinker Quotes

The only way to study the mind is to get at facts, and then intellect will arrange them and deduce the principles.

I would suggest that today, we know about as much concerning the human mind as we knew about the galaxy in 1300.

The belief of our Reason is an Exercise of Faith, and Faith is an Act of Reason.

Neuroscientists are novices at deception.

I do what I do merrily out of curiosity because I want to know how the brain works. That will get me up early in the morning and keep me going all day long.

If you're a thinking person, the liver is interesting, but nothing is more intriguing than the brain.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

I've always loved science, as far back as I can remember. I was very, very curious about how everything worked: the world, the physical universe, chemistry, law. So it was only natural to be curious about how our mind works.

I was interested in the nature of human mental processes, which is what got me interested in psychoanalysis. And it became clear to me after a while that mental processes come from the brain, and in order to understand them, you need to be a biologist of the brain.

By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.

I want to give people theories, I want to expose them to scientific stories that force them to re-evaluate the way they use these three pounds of meat inside their head.

People have wanted to look inside the human mind, the human brain, for thousands of years.

People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections.

I'm quite interested in my own mental processes, simply because I'm a failed scientist, and because I'm interested in how the brain and the mind works, and I like to avoid easy descriptions.

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought

Critics intend on changing the balance of public opinion and of political power.

I have always been interested in that relationship between what happens in our head and what happens in the world.

As a college student, what really interested me was the human brain and human intelligence.

The widespread assumption is that somehow, the brain produces the mind; somehow millions of neurons fire signals at one another create or produce consciousness... but we have no idea how or why this happens. I'm afraid that in many cases, people in the tech world fail to understand that.

Think of all the nonsense you had to learn in psychology courses. None of which was testable. None of which was measurable. We had behaviorism, Freudian psychology, all of these theories that you learn in psychology. Totally untestable. Now, we can test it, because physics allows us to calculate energy flows in the brain.

We have our own brains.

More may have been learned about the brain and the mind in the 1990s - the so-called decade of the brain - than during the entire previous history of psychology and neuroscience.

... sometimes when you are asked a question that is difficult, the mind doesn't stay silent if it doesn't have the answer. The mind produces something, and what it produces very characteristically is the answer to an easier but related question.

At bottom there is but one subject of study: the forms and metamorphoses of mind. All other subjects may be reduced to that; all other studies bring us back to this study.

Once you think a thought, it is extremely difficult to unthink it.