Neuroscientists have, in a sense, simply taken over the elite, almost clerical of...
A plain English overview of how the brain works., 2001-09-27
The book is cleverly structured. Ratey draws you in by beginning each chapter with an account of a real person's perceptual difficulties, the problems these caused in their daily lives because of misdiagnosis and their eventual relief once the real cause was recognized - physical malfunction in the brain. The chapter then becomes more involved as we move away from the personal account to consider how the brain works with regard to the problems described. But the explanation is never overly technical and can easily be grasped by the non-specialist reader. A great deal of trouble has obviously been taken to carefully select the case studies and to present the material in plain English. The writing is concise. Technical terms are always explained when first used. People who are interested in the treatment of depression will find this book very useful. Although depression is not discussed as such, it may come as a revelation to some that we can actually train our brains to 'undepress' ourselves. Anti-depressant drugs, such as the SSRIs, certainly have a role to play but a reading of this book should convince anyone that drugs are by no means the whole answer.

Do we deduce rules from the world around us and behave rationally? Or do we free-associate, discovering the world through experience and creative analogy? The obvious answer is "both". But proof of the obvious answer has long eluded philosophers of mind. Pinker, though, believes he has found it--in the English past tense.

English verbs come in two flavours. Regular verbs have past tenses that look like the present-tense verb with "-ed" on the end--today I walk, yesterday I walked, etc. The second kind of English verb is irregular. Irregular past tenses follow no rules--today I buy, but yesterday I bought; today I hold, yesterday I held.

The way children distinguish between these different sorts of verbs as they learn to talk suggests they learn both by rule and by association. Proving this is Pinker's task--and it's a bravura performance.

It takes nothing away from that other recent lit-hit, Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue, to say that Pinker's book...
A godsend, 2007-01-25
This is a truly brilliant book, in terms of both content and form, which should be in every library. Steven Pinker has the marvellous idea of presenting language and linguistics in the round by concentrating on all the different aspects of regular and irregular verbs. So you get both breadth and depth at the same time, oh so rare in pop science books. Essential for anyone who wants to understand -- and really understand -- language a little more.