50 Psychology and Evolution Phrases of Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and Canadian writer. He is a professor at the Harvard College and head of the "Johnstone Family Proforship" in the Harvard University Psychology. He is known for defending evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of the mind.

Steven Pinker famous quotes

The more you think and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is unsustainable to privilege your interests above theirs.

I would say that nothing makes life more sense than the understanding that every moment, consciousness is a beautiful and fragile gift.

Most wars are not fought due to the shortage of resources, such as food and water, but rather because of conquest, revenge and ideology.

The great attraction of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero is equal to zero.

The culture rests on a neuronal circuitry that performs the feat that we call "learning".

Thinking is a physical process, the human brain is not exempt from evolution.

The mind is not the brain but it is what the brain does; But not everything that the brain does.

The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; They are not rational in business, however, you must think rationally.

Contrary to popular belief, the theory centered on the genes of evolution does not imply that the point of all human effort is to spread our genes.

Without goals, the very concept of intelligence makes no sense.

The history of human madness and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies tell us that men and women are fallible.

All violence that does not happen is not reported in the news.

We will never have a perfect world, but it is not romantic or naive to work for a better.

Natural selection is not the only process that changes organisms over time. But it is the only process that apparently designs organisms over time.

Everyone has a theory of human nature. We all have to anticipate the behavior of others, and that means that we all need theories about what moves people.

Nothing offers life more meaning than the finding that every moment of sensitivity is a beautiful gift.

As technology accumulates and more people from all over the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that someone cannot be killed without killing trade too.

We are living in the sky of primates. We are warm, dry, we are not hungry, we don't have fleas, ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable?

Societies that empower women are less violent in every way.

All our behaviors are the result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe that there is magic happening.

We can remember the reasons to fight for a good style: to improve the dissemination of ideas, to exemplify the attention to detail, and to add beauty of the world.

At every moment we choose, consciously or unconsciously, between good things for now and better things for later.

The art of photography is about directing the viewer's attention.

Human capacity for compassion is not a reflection that is automatically activated by the presence of something else.

Morality comes from the commitment to treat others as we want them to treat us, which is deduced from the finding that none of us is the only occupant of the universe.

As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with low moral; The illusion of the old days.

Children acquire spoken language instinctively, but the writing is learned only with the sweat of their forehead, because spoken language has been a characteristic of human life for tens or hundreds of millennia, while the writing was recent invention and that extended very slowly.

Our visual systems can play bad passes, and it is enough to demonstrate that they are instruments of the non -true.

Babies are born with the instinct of speaking, the way spiders are born with the instinct of spin fabric. It is not necessary that babies to speak; They simply do. But reading is different.

Fiction is empathy technology.

The special status of the brain comes from something special that executes, which makes us see, think, feel, choose and act. This special is the information process or computing.

The romantic idea that all evil is a product of society has justified the release of dangerous psychopaths who immediately murdered innocent people.

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on the details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture in the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

The mind is a neuronal computer.

Of course, the theory of evolution would be empty if it offered a simplistic explanation for each inexplicable act.

The belief that human tastes are nothing more than reversible cultural preferences has led social planners to prevent people from enjoying ornamentation, natural light and human scale, and has forced millions of people to live in gray cement boxes.

The uniform style prevents the presentation from hindering the content.

It is not good that parents stick, humiliate, deprive or abandon their children, because it is frightening that a big and strong person do these things to another little and helpless.

Writers acquire their technique by observing, savoring and using reverse engineering examples of good prose.

Violent movements attract thugs and fearful who enjoy chaos. Violent tactics provide a pretext for the enemy's revenge and alienate third parties that would otherwise support the movement.

I don't think the aggression works like thirst or sleep. I think that aggression is more caused by particular situations. I think you can mitigate.

The fact that adolescents smoke.

Plants cannot defend themselves very well with their behavior, so they turn to chemical war.

Cognitive psychology tells us that the human mind without help is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions due to its dependence on their memory for living anecdotes instead of systematic statistics.

Unfortunately, creative people are more creative when writing their autobiographies.

If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and tried experiments, and lessons will accumulate.

Art theories carry the seeds of their own destruction.

Since violence is largely a male hobby, cultures that allow women to move away from the exaltation of violence and are less likely to raise dangerous subcultures with uprooted young people.

The theory that religion is a force for peace, which is often heard between the religious right and its allies today, does not conform to the facts of history.

It is natural to think that living beings must be the work of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun put behind the earth. The overcoming of naive impressions to find out how things really work is one of the highest calls for humanity.

Why are empirical questions about how the mind works are loaded with political, moral and emotional background?

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