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In culture after culture, people believe that the soul lives on after death, that rituals can change the physical world and divine the truth, and that illness and misfortune are caused and alleviated by spirits, ghosts, saints ... and gods.

Steven Pinker

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Steven Pinker
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: September 18
Anthropologist
Linguist
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Psychologist
University Teacher
Montreal
Quebec
Steven Arthur Pinker
Death
Ghost
Rituals
Spirit
Illness
Ghosts
Truth
Gods
Misfortune
Change
Saint
Saints
Soul
Physical
Spirits
Believe
Divine
Misfortunes
World
Lives
Ritual
People
Culture
Caused
Alleviated

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My laptop has freed me to travel.
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If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophany of spoinks.
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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.
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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.
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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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Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.
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Violent movements attract thugs and firebrands who enjoy the mayhem. Violent tactics provide a pretext for retaliation by the enemy and alienate third parties who might otherwise support the movement.
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As individual people, embedded in our daily lives, of course we're interested in what makes one person different from another. We've got to hire one person and not another, marry one person and not another.
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The reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization.
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Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology.
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We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.
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As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.
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It's the old idea that the process of evolution is some push in the direction of greater complexity--in particular greater intellectual complexity. In one twig of the tree of life, namely ours, having a big brain happened to have advantages. But that's just what worked for a particular species of primate 5 to 7 million years ago.
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We're living in primate heaven. We're warm, dry, we're not hungry, we don't have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable?
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It's likely that taboo words are stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. Massive left hemisphere strokes or the entire surgical removal of the left hemisphere can leave people with no articulate speech other than the ability to swear, spout cliches and song lyrics.
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Knowledge is a continuous fabric, in which ideas are connected to other ideas. Reason-free zones, in which people can assert arbitrary beliefs safe from ordinary standards of evaluation, can only corrupt this fabric, just as a contradiction can corrupt a system of logic, allowing falsehoods to proliferate through it.
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The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing.
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The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.
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