The three laws of behavioral genetics may be the most important discoveries in the history of psychology. Yet most psychologists have not come to gri… - Steven Pinker

Visual thinking is often driven more strongly by the conceptual knowledge we use to organize our images than by the contents of the images themselves. Chess masters are known for their remarkable memory for the pieces on a chessboard. But it's not because people with photographic memories become chess masters. The masters are no better than beginners when remembering a board of randomly arranged pieces. Their memory captures meaningful relations among the pieces, such as threats and defenses, not just their distribution in space.

The human brain is an exquisitely complex organ that evolved only once. The elephant's trunk, which can stack logs, uproot trees, pick up a dime, remove thorns, powder the elephant with dust, siphon water, serve as a snorkel, and scribble with a pencil, is another complex organ that evolved only once.

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group... We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.