The title to this review has four blatantly misspelled words but many people would not have caught that fact because when it reads, the human brain creates an optical illusion and takes the entire word as a whole--glossing over any minor misspellings. You may have seen an email forward to this effect, which demonstrates that one can read perfectly well despite the fact that what they're reading isn't spelled perfectly. This concept goes straight to the heart of the thoroughly enjoyable book, "The Stuff of Thought" by Steven Pinker: communication and psychology aren't what we think they are.

Among dozens of entertaining anecdotes, studies and linguistics examples, Pinker reveals that what we see or read is not what we conceive or remember and this mismatch is the root of much of the antagonism in today's society. One study showed that we don't remember exact sentences, but we remember the gist of the idea. This leads to insight on how the human brain actually works. Pinker explains how Schankian reminding (placing a new concept in the same mental basket as previous events) is why we humans are so smart but also why language is so abstract and imperfect. The brain may be able to respond to 10,000 words, but it puts all of them in just seven basic constructions of thought, which most languages work with.

Pinker is witty, but doesn't waste time getting technical though the entire book is approachable by a non-scientific mind. The book is reminiscent (Schankian?) of Stumbling on Happiness and delves deeper than another interesting book on language, Words That Work. This book deserves many rereads and is recommended to anyone who is interested in finding out why "hammers don't ham" or about society, culture, psychology, or misspelled review titles.

- JSB Morse