🧲 Books like this
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
Steven Pinker · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us
James W. Pennebaker · 360 pages
The Secret Life of Pronouns is based on a large-scale research project that links natural language use to real world social and psychological processes. Using computerized text analyses on hundreds of thousands of letters, poems, books, blogs, Tweets, conversations, and other texts, it is possible to begin to read people’s hearts and minds in ways they can’t do themselves.
Metaphors We Live By
George Lakoff, Mark Johnson · 259 pages
Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"--Metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.
Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking
Douglas R. Hofstadter, Emmanuel Sander · 578 pages
Shows how analogy-making pervades human thought at all levels, influencing the choice of words and phrases in speech, providing guidance in unfamiliar situations, and giving rise to great acts of imagination.
What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves
Benjamin K. Bergen · 287 pages
"Smart as hell and funny as fuck, this book explains why we can't stop swearing and what it tells us about our language and brains. Everyone swears. Only the rare individual can avoid ever letting slip an expletive. And yet, we ban the words from television and insist that polite people excise them from their vocabularies. That's a fucking shame. Not only is swearing colorful, fun, and often power
Language and Mind
Noam Chomsky · 194 pages
This is the long-awaited third edition of Chomsky's outstanding collection of essays on language and mind. The first six chapters, originally published in the 1960s, made a groundbreaking contribution to linguistic theory. This new edition complements them with an additional chapter and a new preface, bringing Chomsky's influential approach into the twenty-first century. Chapters 1-6 present Choms
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind
George Lakoff · 614 pages
Focusing on studies of how humans categorize objects and ideas, this book examines the new understanding of human thought which proposes that human reason is imaginative, metaphorical, and intrinsically linked with the human body.
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
Maryanne Wolf · 320 pages
In the Book. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Harper Perennial, 2008. This is an account of how our brains change as we learn to read.
The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language
John McWhorter · 183 pages
"Japanese has a term that covers both green and blue. Russian has separate terms for dark and light blue. Does this mean that Russians perceive these colors differently from Japanese people? Does language control and limit the way we think, such that each language gives its speakers a different 'worldview?' This opinionated book addresses the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which argues that the language
Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages
Guy Deutscher · 304 pages
This book confronts the thorny question of how and whether culture shapes language and language, culture. Linguistics has long shied away from claiming any link between a language and the culture of its speakers: too much simplistic (even bigoted) chatter about the romance of Italian and the goose-stepping orderliness of German has made serious thinkers wary of the entire subject. But now, acclaim
How Language Works: How Babies Babble, Words Change Meaning, and Languages Live or Die
David Crystal · 506 pages
In the author's own words, "How Language Works is not about music, cookery, or sex. But it is about how we talk about music, cookery, and sex—or, indeed, anything at all." Language is so fundamental to everyday life that we take it for granted. But as David Crystal makes clear in this work of unprecedented scope, language is an extremely powerful tool that defines the human species. Crystal offers
You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation
Deborah Tannen · 330 pages
Just sit down and read it. Yes, you will want to throw it. You will want to forget it, but that is not possible. It will cross your mind and impact you when you would otherwise just get frustrated. There is one major error, when you read it and reflect on it, forget the gender comments, they are a distraction. Gender is not the answer, see the later book, "That's Not What I Ment" for more unde
Seeing Voices
Oliver Sacks · 186 pages
A neurologist investigates the world of the deaf, examining their past and present treatment at the hands of society, and assesses the value and significance of sign language.
I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World
James Geary · 296 pages
Geary's adept explication of the metaphor's role in defining perceptions analyzes how metaphors are used in advertising, scientific discoveries, economics, and politics, as well as how metaphors play in conceptual comprehension and long-term memory.
Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything
David Bellos · 304 pages
Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
David Eagleman · 290 pages
"This book will shine light on some of the hard-to-reach places in the brain, showing the ways in which we are not the ones driving the boat. Why does the conscious mind know so little? What do visual illusions unmask about the machinery running under the hood? How much of our lives are determined by choices and behaviors that are hard-wired, unconscious, and beyond our control? Do we have any man
How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like
Paul Bloom · 280 pages
In this fascinating and witty account, Yale psychologist Paul Bloom draws on insights from child development, philosophy, neuroscience, and behavioral economics to examine the science behind our curious desires, attractions, and tastes, covering everything from the animal instincts for sex and food to the uniquely human taste for art, music, and stories.
The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty
Simon Baron-Cohen · 256 pages
The Skeptic's Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions
Robert Todd Carroll · 446 pages
A wealth of evidence for doubters and disbelievers "Whether it's the latest shark cartilage scam, or some new 'repressed memory' idiocy that besets you, I suggest you carry a copy of this dictionary at all times, or at least have it within reach as first aid for psychic attacks. We need all the help we can get." -James Randi, President, James Randi Educational Foundation, randi.org "From al
A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness
Michael Pollan · 320 pages
Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals
Hal Herzog · 334 pages
Does living with a pet really make people happier and healthier? What can we learn from biomedical research with mice? Who enjoys a better quality of life -- the chicken destined for your dinner plate or the rooster in a Saturday night cockfight? Why is it wrong to eat the family dog? Drawing on more than two decades of research into the emerging field of anthrozoology, the science of human–animal
Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention
Stanislas Dehaene · 388 pages
A renowned cognitive neuroscientist's fascinating and highly informative account of how the brain acquires readingHow can a few black marks on a white page evoke an entire universe of sounds and meanings? In this riveting investigation, Stanislas Dehaene provides an accessible account of the brain circuitry of reading and explores what he calls the "reading paradox": Our cortex is the product of m
The Meme Machine
Susan Blackmore · 264 pages
After Richard Dawkins' *The Selfish Gene*, Susan Blackmore drive us deeply into the theory of the meme, social and cultural "replicators", trying to explain the human unique ability to imitate. Altruism, ideas, human behaviours, sex, poetry, music... seems to be simply the result of such as memetic selection... > Even our inner conscious self and our sense of free will are illlusion created by
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
James Gleick · 526 pages
From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long misunderstood "talking drums" of Africa, James Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He also provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information, including Charles Babbage, Ada Byron, Samuel Morse, Alan Tur