Noncompositional

It’s funny. There’s been an issue of Time magazine sitting on my coffee table for at least a week now, dedicated to the brain and recent research in neurology and psychology. Until tonight, I hadn’t looked through it much (it’s my roommate’s subscription), but I picked it up while eating dinner and started reading an article about the neural-computational basis for consciousness. I skimmed to the end, and found it was written by Stephen Pinker. This becomes particularly relevant later. I then went back and read the article more carefully.

I then flipped through a few more articles, and found in the middle of one a blown-up quotation (what are those things called?) that mentioned mirror neurons. Now, the mirror neuron is a relatively significant finding in some corners of cognitive linguistics, so I took a closer look. I found that one of the researchers mentioned (and indeed, the one mentioned at the very beginning of the article) was Lisa Aziz-Zaheh, who I met when she spent a year at ICSI. See, it’s really only a few steps until mainstream linguistics gets the front page treatment from Time!

Then, later this evening, I found that Stephen Colbert had interviewed Pinker last night. I watched the interview (which was nice, with some good lines from Colbert; I enjoyed the geek/rich geek analogy), and was amused that the first question from Colbert was about Pinker’s hair, which is admittedly quite noticeable. Noticeable enough that, in fact, it’s pretty easy to find somewhere on the web evidence of yours truly also commenting on the psychologist’s hair (though at a time when it was a bit shorter than it is now).