http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2010/09/10
It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without words. But in this hour of Radiolab, we try to do just that. We speak to a woman who taught a 27-year-old man the first words of his life, and we hear a firsthand account of what it feels like to have the language center of your brain wiped out by a stroke.
If it comes to you easily, being able to read is easy to take for granted. But reading is an extraordinarily complex process, one that researchers are still working to understand fully. On today’s Please Explain we look at the science of reading. Dr. Sally E. Shaywitz and Dr. Bennett A. Shaywitz are professors in Learning Development at the Yale University School of Medicine and Co-Directors of the Yale Center for Learning.
Talk about the relevance of linguistics and implications for neuroscience
Tagged with linguistics language alice gaby brain neuroscience science
Dr. Anna Meyer, UCSF Division of Pediatric Otolaryngology, explores how hearing and speech develop and why the early years are so critical.
With Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.
Chair: Matthew Taylor, chief executive, RSA
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.
How can a choice of metaphors start a war, impeach a president, or win an election? How does a mind that evolved to think about rocks and plants and enemies think about love and physics and democracy? How do we control the amount of information that we absorb? And what good does this actually do us?
Join Steven Pinker as he tries to answer these questions and many more, unlocking the hidden workings of our thoughts, our emotions and our social relationships and showing us that language really can tell us unexpected and fascinating things about ourselves.