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| Photo Credit: Donna Coveney |
April 16, 1997 (Thursday) at 8:00 p.m.
Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center
University at Albany, Uptown Campus
4:00 p.m. Seminar, Assembly Hall, Campus Center
Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker is the author of two best-selling books on the human mind and Director of the McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Pinker's 1994 book, The Language Instinct, elucidates for the layperson the scientific evidence that supports Noam Chomsky's assertion that the human capacity for language is built into the infant brain. The New York Times Book Review called The Language Institute, "a brilliant, witty and altogether satisfying book. . .Mr. Pinker has that facility so rare among scientists, of making the most difficult material accessible to the average reader."
His latest book, How the Mind Works (1997), is a more comprehensive presentation of the findings of cognitive science, which treats the mind as a machine for information processing, and evolutionary psychology, which regards the mind as a product of natural selection. Newsday calls How the Mind Works, a "wild intellectural ride. . .undeniably brilliant," and the New York Review of Books calls it "a model of scientific writing: erudite, witty, and clear. . .an excellent book."
Steven Pinker is one of the world's leading cognitive scientists. He received degrees from McGill and Harvard, and taught at Harvard and Stanford before joining the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. He as won numerous awards for his research, teaching, and writing, and has published a number of articles for Time, The New Republic and the New York Times.
". . .masterful . . .clearly written. He has a gift for making enormously complicated mechanisms--and human foibles--accessible. . ."
- Publishers Weekly on How the Mind Works