Fall Book Selection

This fall we'll be reading Micheal Tomasello's The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition [Amazon $20.95]. Tomasello presents an alternative to the idea from Evolutionary Psychology (along with Chomskian nativism) that we evolved to use a special language organ in the brain. Instead, Tomasello argues, by contrasting human theory-of-mind abilities with those of primates and autistic children that we can see that the broad-based cognitive mechanisms that provide for cultural learning generally can be used specifically to promote language learning in humans.

UPDATE [08.26.05] We will meet every other Wednesday at noon in SC 200, beginning September 14 (discuss first chapter).

We can use this blog to post discussion items, background information, and interesting links relevant to the book (or anything neuro-). Another online discussion of this book is led at the Mixing Memory blog.