How Do You Know Where the Words Start and Stop?

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

When you hit a certain age, maybe 13 for the sound of a language, 17 for the syntax, it shuts down mostly. And second language learning is murder. So gradually, starting off English sounds to a kid like Chinese, or Hebrew sounds to me just as mishmash and noise. We can't even understand the idea that somebody couldn't hear it as much as this thing. Works that our mind puts in the slots.

Do psychologists know anything? Psychologist Paul Bloom says yes--but not the things that you might think. Bloom discusses his book Psych with EconTalk's Russ Roberts and what the field of psychology can teach us about human intelligence, consciousness, and unhelpful instincts. They also discuss just how far psychology is from a true understanding of the human mind, and why, according to Bloom, that might not be such a bad thing.