Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Cognitive psychologist and Harvard professor known for work on language origins and the psychology of violence.
On the island
Eight records
Further on Up the RoadFavourite
performing at the Last Waltz concert with the Band. It captures the camaraderie of musicians on stage. A few seconds into the song, Eric Clapton's guitar falls off its strap and he yells out Rob… and without missing a beat, you have Robbie Robertson playing a guitar solo. And this also marked, I think, a turning point in popular music.
Andy Statman Klezmer Orchestra with Itzhak Perlman
This is a terrific example of klezmer music, the music of the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe, and a lot of people associate it with the infectious dance rhythms of a Jewish wedding.
This is I guess my my atheist song. The musician begins the song, I Wish You Had Known Me While I Was Alive, and he narrates his encounter with the Almighty.
This was actually from an old Spanish Civil War song, Venga Haleo, which he then completely transformed, giving rise to a kind of cool, eerie feeling.
We're going to hear the mellifluous voice of Aaron Neville articulating one of the great human concerns that this man has been dumped by his woman and he is pleading with the moon to tell him where his ex-girlfriend is.
Leonard Cohen grew up in the community that I grew up in, was a contemporary of my mother's, and wrote the romantic song I'm Your Man, which Rebecca insists that I sing to her every Valentine's Day.
This is one of the great anti-war songs from the 1960s. Unlike a lot of the anti-war songs, it's not sentimental or treakly, but actually rather harrowing, in which both the guitar and the drum riffs replicate the sound of a machine gun.
A quite remarkable display of singing virtuosity, but also a kind of linguistic virtuosity. This is the great lost art form of scat singing, in which nonsense syllables are put to music, and it's the aspect of language that has nothing to do with meaning or syntax, but just the pure joy of sound.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:23You almost seem in that quote to be subscribing to the notion of nurture over nature, as what is central to your life and your personality.
I don't believe that nature and nurture are alternatives. I just believe that nature can't be ignored in understanding nurture. I don't think my parents shaped my personality or my intellect other than by conceiving me, but I do think they gave me a lot of content and subject matter to think about.
Presenter asks
2:06You're a very influential scientist, you're also a very controversial scientist. How does that sit with you?
I never think that I'm going to be controversial. The opinions that I express always seem perfectly obvious to me when they occur to me. But controversy is what advances ideas, so I don't mind being controversial. I don't aim to be controversial. I just throw out the idea that strikes me as most explanatory and best supported by the evidence. And if other people disagree, we'll see how well the idea survives.
Presenter asks
2:56How do you actually relax?
With photography, with bicycling.
The keepsakes
The book
As a student of language, it has to be the Oxford English Dictionary. Not only is it big, it would keep me busy for a long time, but it captures the history of the English language.
The luxury
Not only would it get me around the island, but a bicycle is a triumph of engineering. You've got combined the biomechanical efficiency of muscle, which has been honed by a billion years of evolution, with the one thing that evolution could not produce, namely a wheel.
Presenter asks
5:27Your views about the roles of genes in the formation of who we are caused a considerable stir. Can you encapsulate for listeners what your argument then is?
Yes, it's that the mind is not a blank slate. This does not mean that culture is unimportant, it doesn't mean that socialization is unimportant, it doesn't mean that learning is unimportant, but we do it because we have got a nature that makes us pay attention to certain things in the environment and not others, that makes us learn certain things easily and other things with great difficulty. So you can't understand learning and culture and socialization without understanding the innate parts of human nature that make culture possible.
Presenter asks
7:16I mentioned in the introduction the person who sent you hate mail on the subject of irregular verbs. What did he feel so passionately you were getting wrong?
People have strong opinions on what is the correct form when it comes to irregular verbs. I use the past tense form snuck as the past tense of sneak. I don't think there's anything odd about it, but anyone older than me feels that this is kind of slang or cutesy. But the language is changing, and I think the ne at least in in America, the next generation is going to have no problem with snuck whatsoever.
Presenter asks
11:16And you became an atheist when you were thirteen. Why was that?
I don't have a clear memory of becoming an atheist. I don't think I ever had a distinct belief in God. What was much more important was the traditions, the community, the awareness of the Holocaust, the awareness of Israel. And God, you know, it was a part of it, but not a major part. And I think as soon as I started just thinking for myself, there was just no room for God. There was just no evidence for Him.
“I don't believe that nature and nurture are alternatives. I just believe that nature can't be ignored in understanding nurture.”
“I don't think my parents shaped my personality or my intellect other than by conceiving me, but I do think they gave me a lot of content and subject matter to think about.”
“The parents are right, the child is wrong. But I did learn something that later affected my view of human nature and political theory.”
“I think as soon as I started just thinking for myself, there was just no room for God. There was just no evidence for Him.”
“The greatest gratification I get from readers who write to me is not so much you've convinced me that this idea is right or wrong, but rather I never realized you could ask these questions, that you could treat human behavior as an intellectual problem to be pondered.”