“As with any form of mental self-improvement, you must learn to turn your gaze inward, concentrate on processes that usually run automatically, and try to wrest control of them so that you can apply them more mindfully.”

Canadian cognitive psychologist and public intellectual

Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is known for his work on the mind, language, and human nature, and for presenting those subjects to a wide general audience. Pinker supports evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. He is the Johnstone Family professor of psychology at Harvard University, and his writing often returns to questions about how people think, speak, and understand the world.