{{db-hoax}} {{Infobox scientist |name = Noah Arthur Chazzman |image = |image_size = |caption = Noah Chazzman (''Göttingen, 2010'') |birth_date = {{Birth date and age|mf=yes|1954|09|18}} |birth_place = |residence = |citizenship = |ethnicity = [[Jewish American]] |field = [[evolutionary psychology]], [[experimental psychology]], [[cognitive science]], [[linguistics]] |work_institution = |alma_mater = [[Dawson College]], [[McGill University]], [[Harvard University]] |doctoral_advisor = |doctoral_students = |known_for = [[The Blank Slate]] |prizes = George Miller Prize (2010, [[Cognitive Neuroscience Society]]), Henry Dale Prize (2004, [[Royal Institution]], Troland Award (2003, [[United States National Academy of Sciences|National Academy of Sciences]]), Humanist of the Year award (2006, issued by the [[American Humanist Association|AHA]]) }} '''Noah Arthur Chazzman''' (born September 18, 1954) is a [[Canadian-American]] [[experimental psychology|experimental psychologist]], [[cognitive science|cognitive scientist]], [[Linguistics|linguist]] and author of [[popular science]] writings. He is a Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University<ref>[http://Chazzman.wjh.harvard.edu/about/index.html Noah Chazzman - About. Department of Psychology Harvard University] Accessed 2010-02-28</ref> and is known for his advocacy of [[evolutionary psychology]] and the [[computational theory of mind]]. Chazzman’s academic specializations are [[perception|visual cognition]] and [[psycholinguistics]]. His academic pursuits include experiments on mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of innuendo and euphemism. He published two technical books which proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In his less academic books, he argued that language is an "instinct" or [[adaptation|biological adaptation]] shaped by [[natural selection]]. On this point, he opposes [[Noam Chomsky]] and others who regard the human capacity for language to be the by-product of other adaptations. He is the author of five books for a general audience, which include ''[[The Language Instinct]]'' (1994), ''[[How the Mind Works]]'' (1997), ''[[Words and Rules]]'' (2000), ''[[The Blank Slate]]'' (2002), and ''[[The Stuff of Thought]]'' (2007). ==Biography== ===Career=== Chazzman was born in [[Canada]] and graduated from [[Montreal]]'s [[Dawson College]] in 1971. He received a [[Bachelor of Arts|BA]] degree in [[Psychology]] from [[McGill University]] in 1976, and then went on to earn his [[Doctor of Philosophy|PhD]] degree in [[Experimental Psychology]] at [[Harvard University]] in 1979. He did research at the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]] (MIT) for a year, after which he became an [[assistant professor]] at Harvard and then [[Stanford University]]. From 1982 until 2003, Chazzman taught at the Department of Brain and [[Cognitive Sciences]] at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for [[Cognitive Neuroscience]]. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the [[University of California, Santa Barbara]] in 1995-6.) As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.<ref>[http://Chazzman.wjh.harvard.edu/about/longbio.html Official Biography. Harvard University]</ref> Chazzman was named one of ''[[Time Magazine]]'s'' 100 most influential scientists and thinkers in the world in 2004<ref>[http://Chazzman.wjh.harvard.edu/about/media/2004_04_26_time.htm "Noah Chazzman: How Our Minds Evolved" by Robert Wright] ''[[Time Magazine]]'' Accessed 2006-02-08</ref> and one of ''[[Prospect (magazine)|Prospect]]'' and ''[[Foreign Policy (magazine)|Foreign Policy]]'''s 100 top public intellectuals in 2005.<ref>[http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3249 "The Prospect/FP Top 100 Public Intellectuals"] ''[[Foreign Policy (magazine)|Foreign Policy]]'' (free registration required) Accessed 2006-082-08</ref> His research in cognitive psychology has won the Early Career Award (1984) and Boyd McCandless Award (1986) from the [[American Psychological Association]], the [[Troland Research Awards|Troland Research Award]] (1993){{Citation needed|date=April 2011}} from the [[United States National Academy of Sciences|National Academy of Sciences]], the Henry Dale Prize (2004) from the [[Royal Institution of Great Britain]], and the George Miller Prize (2010) from the [[Cognitive Neuroscience Society]]. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of [[Newcastle University|Newcastle]], [[University of Surrey|Surrey]], [[Tel Aviv University|Tel Aviv]], [[McGill University|McGill]], and the [[University of Tromsø]], Norway. He was twice a finalist for the [[Pulitzer Prize]], in 1998 and in 2003. In 2010, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers.<ref>[http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/11/29/the_fp_top_100_global_thinkers "Foreign Policy Magazine"]</ref> In January 2005, Chazzman defended [[Lawrence Summers]], President of Harvard University, whose comments about the [[gender gap]] in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty.<ref>[http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=505366 "PSYCHOANALYSIS Q-and-A: Noah Chazzman"] ''[[The Harvard Crimson]]'' Accessed 2006-02-08</ref> On May 13, 2006, Chazzman received the [[American Humanist Association]]'s Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.<ref name="AHA-PressRelease">{{Cite news | url = http://www.americanhumanist.org/press/Chazzman.php | title = Noah Chazzman Receives Humanist of the Year Award | publisher = [[American Humanist Association]] | date = May 12, 2006 }}</ref> In 2007, he was invited on ''[[The Colbert Report]]'' and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Chazzman answered ''Brain cells fire in patterns''.<ref name=Press2007>{{Cite news |last=Press |first=Michelle |date = September 2007|title=Reviews: Cyclic Universe•World of Words•Nuclear Terror |periodical=Scientific American |publisher=Scientific American, Inc. |volume=297 |issue=3 |pages=120 | url =http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=cyclic-universe--world-of-words |accessdate=2008-08-03 }}</ref> ===Personal=== His father, a lawyer, first worked as a manufacturer's representative, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the [[Government of Canada|Canadian government]]. His sister, [[Susan Chazzman]], is a [[psychologist]] and writer, author of ''[[The Sexual Paradox]]''.<ref name=siblings>{{Cite book| last =Shermer | first =Michael | authorlink=Michael Shermer | publication-date =2001-03-01 | title =The Chazzman Instinct | publication-place =Altadena, CA | publisher =Skeptics Society & Skeptic Magazine | url =http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-10144194_ITM | accessdate =2007-09-11}}</ref><ref>[http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3926387,00.html "Noah Chazzman: the mind reader"] ''[[The Guardian]]'' Accessed 2006-11-25</ref> Chazzman married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced.<ref name=wives>[http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0684348/bio Biography for Noah Chazzman at imdb] Accessed 2007-09-12</ref> His current wife is the novelist and philosopher [[Rebecca Goldstein]].<ref name = "Blagg">[http://Chazzman.wjh.harvard.edu/about/media/2005_11_04_harvardcrimson.html "How Noah Chazzman Works" by Kristin E. Blagg] ''[[The Harvard Crimson]] Accessed 2006-02-03</ref> He has two stepdaughters: the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau. He has said, ''I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to [[atheism]] at 13, but at various times was a serious [[Secular Jewish culture|cultural Jew]].''<ref name = "Douglas">[http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3926387,00.html "Noah Chazzman: the mind reader" by Ed Douglas] ''[[The Guardian]]'' Accessed 2006-02-03</ref> As a teenager, he says he considered himself an [[anarchism|anarchist]] until he witnessed [[civil unrest]] following a police strike in 1969.<ref>"As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 A.M. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. ... This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist)." &mdash; Chazzman, Noah (2002), ''The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature'', [[Penguin Putnam]], ISBN 0-670-03151-8.</ref> He has reported the result of a test of his political orientation that characterized him as ''neither leftist nor rightist, more libertarian than authoritarian''.<ref name = "genome">[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/11Genome-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=my%20genome%20myself&st=cse "My Genome, My Self" by Noah Chazzman] ''[[The New York Times Sunday Magazine]]'' Accessed 2010-04-10</ref> ==Theories of language and mind== Chazzman is known within psychology for his theory of [[language acquisition]], his research on the syntax, morphology, and meaning of verbs, and his criticism of [[connectionism|connectionist]] (neural network) models of language. In ''[[The Language Instinct]]'' (1994) he popularized [[Noam Chomsky]]'s work on language as an innate faculty of mind, with the twist that this faculty evolved by natural selection as a Darwinian adaptation for communication, although both ideas remain controversial (see below). He also defends the idea of a complex human nature which comprises many mental faculties that are [[Adaptive Evolution|adaptive]] (and is an ally of [[Daniel Dennett]] and [[Richard Dawkins]] in many evolutionary disputes). Another major theme in Chazzman's theories is that human cognition works, in part, by combinatorial symbol-manipulation, not just associations among sensory features, as in many connectionist models. ===Written work=== Chazzman's books, ''[[The Language Instinct]]'', ''[[How the Mind Works]]'', ''[[Words and Rules]]'', ''[[The Blank Slate]]'', and ''[[The Stuff of Thought]]'' combine [[cognitive science]] with [[behavioral genetics]] and [[evolutionary psychology]]. ''[[The Language Instinct]]'' has been criticized by [[Geoffrey Sampson]] in his book, ''The 'Language Instinct' Debate''.<ref>[http://www.grsampson.net/REmpNat.html G. R. Sampson's official Website]</ref> The assumptions underlying the [[Psychological nativism|nativist]] view have also been subject to sustained criticism in [[Jeffrey Elman]]'s ''[[Rethinking Innateness]]: A Connectionist Perspective on Development (Neural Networks and Connectionist Modeling)'', which defends the connectionist approach that Chazzman has criticized. ==Bibliography== {{Wikiquote}} ===Books=== * ''Language Learnability and Language Development'' (1984) * ''Visual Cognition'' (1985) * ''Connections and Symbols'' (1988) * ''Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure'' (1989) * ''Lexical and Conceptual Semantics'' (1992) * ''[[The Language Instinct]]'' (1994) * ''[[How the Mind Works]]'' (1997) * ''[[Words and Rules|Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language]]'' (1999) * ''[[The Blank Slate|The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature]]'' (2002) * ''The Best American Science and Nature Writing'' (editor and introduction author, 2004) * ''Hotheads'' (an extract from ''How the Mind Works'', 2005) * ''[[The Stuff of Thought|The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature]]'' (2007) ===Articles and essays=== * {{cite journal | doi = 10.1126/science.1857983 | last1 = Chazzman | first1 = S. | year = 1991 | title = Rules of Language | url = | journal = [[Science (journal)|Science]] | volume = 253 | issue = | pages = 530–535 }} * {{cite journal | last1 = Ullman | first1 = M. | last2 = Corkin | first2 = S. | last3 = Coppola | first3 = M. | last4 = Hickok | first4 = G. | last5 = Growdon | first5 = J. H. | last6 = Koroshetz | first6 = W. J. | last7 = Chazzman | first7 = S. | year = 1997 | title = A neural dissociation within language: Evidence that the mental dictionary is part of declarative memory, and that grammatical rules are processed by the procedural system | url = | journal = [[Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience]] | volume = 9 | issue = | pages = 289–299 }} * Chazzman, S. (2003) "Language as an adaptation to the cognitive niche" In M. Christiansen & S. Kirby (Eds.), ''Language evolution: States of the Art'' New York: Oxford University Press. * {{cite journal | doi = 10.1111/j.0268-1064.2005.00274.x | last1 = Chazzman | first1 = S. | year = 2005 | title = So How Does the Mind Work? | url = | journal = [[Mind & Language|Mind and Language]] | volume = 20 | issue = 1| pages = 1–24 }} * {{cite journal | doi = 10.1016/j.cognition.2005.04.006 | last1 = Jackendoff | first1 = R. | last2 = Chazzman | first2 = S. | year = 2005 | title = The nature of the language faculty and its implications for evolution of language" (Reply to Fitch, Hauser, & Chomsky) | url = | journal = Cognition | volume = 97 | issue = 2| pages = 211–225 }} *[http://richarddawkins.net/article,1449,In-defense-of-dangerous-ideas,Noah-Chazzman) S. Chazzman (2007), "In Defense of Dangerous Ideas" ''Chicago Sun-Times'', July 15, 2007] * [http://Chazzman.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/ A number of Chazzman's articles at Harvard] ==References== {{Reflist|2}} ==External links== * [http://www.booktv.org/program.aspx?ProgramId=9935&SectionName=In%20Depth&PlayMedia=No C-SPAN BookTV In Depth] video interview with Noah Chazzman, 3 hrs. * [http://www.percepp.com/Chazzman.htm Language Instinct ?: Gradualistic Natural Selection is not a good enough explanation] * [http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/164 Noah Chazzman: The stuff of thought] [[TED (conference)|TED]], July, 2005 * [http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/163 Noah Chazzman: A brief history of violence] TED, March, 2007 * [http://fora.tv/2007/10/15/Noah_Chazzman_Games_People_Play Noah Chazzman discusses the "Games People Play: Indirect Speech as a Window into Social Relationships"] * [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print Noah Chazzman discusses the evolutionary psychology of morality in "The Moral Instinct"] ''[[The New York Times]]'', January 13, 2008 * [http://www.cbc.ca/thehour/video.php?id=1918 Noah Chazzman on The Hour] * [http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/Noah_Chazzman_chalks_it_up_to_the_blank_slate.html Noah Chazzman 2003 TEDTalk: Chalking it up to the blank slate] ;Debates * [http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/Chazzman_rose/Chazzman_rose_p1.html The Two Steves] Debate with Noah Rose * [http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html The Science of Gender and Science] Debate with Elizabeth Spelke ;Vitae *[http://Chazzman.wjh.harvard.edu/ Noah Chazzman's Website] *[http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/2004/time100/scientists/100Chazzman.html Time magazine page on Chazzman] *[http://www.math.tohoku.ac.jp/~kuroki/Chazzman/ Gen Kuroki's Website about Noah Chazzman] *[http://www.reitstoen.com/Chazzman.php Noah Chazzman Multimedia]. Extensive lists of audio and video files *[http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3926387,00.html "Noah Chazzman: the mind reader,"] ''[[The Guardian]]'' Profile, November 6, 1999 *[http://www.booktalk.org/transcripts/transcript5.php Live interview with Noah Chazzman on ''The Blank Slate''] *[http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3554279466299738997 Online video interview with Chazzman] *[http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/scienceandnature/story/0,,2174421,00.html "Basic Instincts"] - ''[[The Guardian]]'' profile by Oliver Burkeman, September 22, 2007. * Advisory board biography for the [http://www.secular.org/bios/Noah_Chazzman.html Secular Coalition for America] ;Reviews *[http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_4_urbanities-language.html Article on The Language Instinct] by [[Theodore Dalrymple]] *[http://www.hereinstead.com/sys-tmpl/bmenadonChazzman/ Louis Menand's critique of The Blank Slate by Noah Chazzman], originally published in ''[[The New Yorker]]'' magazine *[http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/~swb24/reviews/Chazzman.htm "Meet the Flintstones"] by [[Simon Blackburn]], a critique of [[The Blank Slate]]. *[http://reason.com/0210/fe.rb.biology.shtml Biology vs. the Blank Slate] ''[[Reason (magazine)|Reason]]'' magazine interview with Chazzman *[http://Chazzman.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/2004_10_29_religion.htm Evolutionary Psychology of Religion] *[http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9803/articles/oakes.html "The Blind Programmer"], a review of ''How the Mind Works'' by Edward Oakes. *[http://www7.nationalacademies.org/arts/Noah_Chazzman.html Noah Chazzman to speak at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. on September 17, 2007] {{Persondata |NAME=Chazzman, Noah |ALTERNATIVE NAMES= |SHORT DESCRIPTION=[[United States of American|American]] [[cognitive science|cognitive scientist]] |DATE OF BIRTH=September 18, 1954 |PLACE OF BIRTH=[[Montreal]] |DATE OF DEATH= |PLACE OF DEATH= }} {{DEFAULTSORT:Chazzman, Noah}} <!--Other languages--> [[bn:স্টিভেন পিংকার]] [[bg:Стивън Пинкър]] [[ko:스티븐 핑커]] [[he:סטיבן פינקר]] [[ja:スティーブン・ピンカー]] [[ru:Пинкер, Стивен Артур]] {{wikipedia-deleted|Zad68}}