As Director of the Royal Institution of Science, Susan Greenfield's main objective is to encourage the greater public understanding of scientific ideas. In this book, she introduces us to the inside of our heads and shows the kind of enthusiasm about the brain that other writers reserve for fine art or football. The idea of 'intelligence'.
This fascinating book collects together the findings of various scientific studies, old and new, concerning the human face. One of these has shown that 30 minutes after birth, when our eyes can hardly focus, we gaze at laces rather than anything else.
Where does our feeling for language come from? How do we learn to speak it so effortlessly? Why is it so hard for adults to learn a foreign language? Cleverly structured, with many amusing anecdotes, linguist Steven linker's book examines why we use language and where this ability comes from. His personal belief is that language is as instinctive to us as flying is to geese, and that we use it to great effect in order to communicate. He illustrates his theory with examples of language taken from various sources, including children's conversations, pop culture and politicians' speeches.
This is a book for people who want to have the latest intellectual theories. Did you know, for example, that whoever our parents may be, we are all united by DNA, ’The basic stuff of life’, which contains our genes?
