The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature By Steven Pinker

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind. The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004, edited by Steven Pinker, is another "provocative and thoroughly enjoyable [collection] from start to finish" (Publishers Weekly). Here is the best and newest on science and nature: the psychology of suicide terrorism, desperate measures in surgery, the weird world of octopuses, Sex Week at Yale, the linguistics of click languages, the worst news about cloning, and much more.

These essays tackle some of the central issues in visual cognition, presentingexperimental techniques from cognitive psychology, new ways of modeling cognitive processes oncomputers from artificial intelligence, and new ways of studying brain organization fromneuropsychology, to address such questions as: How do we recognize objects in front of us? How do wereason about objects when they are absent and only in memory? How do we conceptualize the threedimensions of space? Do different people do these things in different ways? And where are theseabilities located in the brain?While this research, which appeared as a special issue of the journalCognition, is at the cutting edge of cognitive science, it does not assume a highly technicalbackground on the part of readers. The book begins with a tutorial introduction by the editor,making it suitable for specialists and nonspecialists alike.Steven Pinker is Associate Professor,Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive Science at MIT.