Hacking Language Learning: Benny Lewis at TEDxWarsaw

source: TEDxTalks  2013年05月15日
"Some people just don't have the language learning gene." To prove that this statement is patently untrue is Benny Lewis's life mission. A monoglot till after leaving university, Benny now runs the World's most popular language learning blog and is learning Egyptian Arabic which will be language number twelve, or maybe thirteen. But who's counting?

Steven Pinker - How The Mind Works (10/15/97 at MIT)

source: TheEthanwashere  2012年8月4日
Dr. Pinker talked about his new book How the Mind Works. He examined two different approaches to studying the mind and offered examples from everyday life to illustrate his ideas. Following his prepared remarks, Dr. Pinker took questions from the audience.

Authors@Google: Steven Pinker

source: Talks at Google  2011年11月01日
The author of The New York Times bestseller The Stuff of Thought offers a controversial history of violence.

Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millennia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species's existence. For most of history, war, slavery, infanticide, child abuse, assassinations, pogroms, gruesome punishments, deadly quarrels, and genocide were ordinary features of life. But today, Pinker shows (with the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps) all these forms of violence have dwindled and are widely condemned.

Exploding fatalist myths about humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious and provocative book is sure to be hotly debated in living rooms and the Pentagon alike, and will challenge and change the way we think about our society.

Why Are Bad Words Bad?

source: Vsauce

Steven Pinker - The Stuff of Thought: Language as a window into human na...

source: The RSA 2010年02月04日
For Steven Pinker, the brilliance of the mind lies in the way it uses just two processes to turn the finite building blocks of our language into infinite meanings. The first is metaphor: we take a concrete idea and use it as a stand-in for abstract thoughts. The second is combination: we combine ideas according to rules, like the syntactic rules of language, to create new thoughts out of old ones.
Note - This video contains strong language.