The Life Scientific

Cognitive psychologist, Steven Pinker, has been dubbed "science's agent provocateur". Pinker studies how the mind works. Presenter Jim al-Khalili wants to find out how his mind works. Pinker replies: "as a psychologist you look at your own life as data and say geez that's what I'm like". From verbs to violence, he's author of several books that many say are mind-changing. He's now something of a science superstar, but his early experiments with electrodes on rats didn't quite go according to plan: "I realised then that that kind of science required a level of meticulousness that I just didn't have". So instead of studying neuroscience, he became a cognitive psychologist. Now perhaps better known for his writing than his science, he shot to fame with his book The Language Instinct, based on his early studies of how children tackle irregular verbs, for example saying "holded" not held, and "digged" instead of dug. These cute sounding mistakes are proof that three year olds are grammatical geniuses, he says. And