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Words and music: two ways of thinking about what our brains can do.

Article Excerpt
THE STUFF OF THOUGHT Language as a Window into Human Nature By Steven Pinker Viking | $29.95

MUSICOPHILIA Tales of Music and the Brain By Oliver Sacks Norton | $26

Readers of serious but popular books about neuroscience can look forward this fall to new works by two favorite writers. The Stuff of Thought, by Steven Pinker, completes his two trilogies, one on language and the other on human nature. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, by neurologist Oliver Sacks, opens up new vistas on matters of the mind, this time in relation to music.

Pinker's book is interesting, and the parts about the interactions of grammar and thought are intricately drawn and compelling. There is a lot more in here though--Pinker's ideas about cursing and naming, and about how boys are better than girls at math. These things are not worked out with anything like the care he takes with grammar. His arrogance and adolescent humor are not just style; they fill so many pages that they become content, at times overwhelming the valuable parts of the book.

Yet, the sections about language acquisition are complex and powerful. Like his mentor, the groundbreaking linguist Noam Chomsky, Pinker looks at grammar as a way of understanding the nature of thought. He asks how children can learn a language as wildly chaotic and irregular as English. Do they memorize all the constructions? It seems like a big job. But a close look at irregular constructions shows that, amazingly, they can easily be divided into groups, such as verbs that describe the way something begins an action. Poured, for instance, is a verb that is descriptive of the way something comes out (it happens when something that does not move as a single piece is allowed to fall), not the way something touches down. Once you recognize these categories, many mysteries are solved. Pinker's position is that "the number of rules needed is large but not onerous." He maintains that the human mind has a few concepts that come preset but that it learns the rest and manages to do so because there is method to much of what looks like mad irregularity.

Pinker uses grammar to discuss time. Kant said that we bring space and time to our perception and our thought; space and time aren't really out there in the world. The new linguistic insight is that humanity developed language when we already had a sense of space; only then did...