Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, has been studying language for more than four decades, yet he’s not particularly interested in language per se. Instead, he views it “as a window to the human mind.”
For one, it suggests that we mostly remember in gists and abstractions. Imagine sitting down for a lengthy lecture, Pinker described.
“If I were to ask you to reproduce any sentence that I have uttered, you would be incapable of doing so. What sticks in memory is far more abstract than the actual sentences, something that we can call meaning or content or semantics.”
Language also showcases the sizable capacity of human long-term memory.
“A typical high school graduate has a vocabulary of around 60,000 words, which works out to a rate of learning of about one new word every two hours starting from the age of one,” Pinker said.
Third, language reveals the human mind’s near-infinite creativity.
“Except for a small number of clichéd formulas, just about any sentence that you produce or understand is a brand new combination produced for the first time perhaps in your life, perhaps even in the history of the species,” Pinker noted.
