I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover … - Steven Pinker

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People who make lots of money at what they do should just shut up about it.

Steven Pinker

I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation.

Distinction, Memories, Obsessive, Regular, Verbs, Years

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All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.

Activity, Believe, Magic, Neurophysiological, Psychology, Reason

Being smarter gives you a tailwind throughout life. People who are more intelligent earn more, live longer, get divorced less, are less likely to get addicted to alcohol and tobacco, and their children live longer.

Alcohol, Children, Intelligent, Live, People

I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.

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When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think.

Behavior, Children, Human, Mind, Thinking, War

In many Muslim countries, witchcraft is not only on the books as a crime, but is commonly prosecuted. In 2009, for example, Saudi Arabia convicted a man for carrying a phone booklet with characters in an alphabet from his native Eritrea, which the police interpreted as occult symbols. He was lashed three hundred times and imprisoned for more than three years.

Book, Carrying, Character, Country, Crime, Eritrea