Rowe Dispelling Myths about the Relationship between Language and Thought Review of The Language Hoax : Why The World Looks The Same In Any Language

It seems like only yesterday that our inquiry into the literature came from mainstream journals like this one and it's many descendants. Included in the required literature were only a few books. For the cognitive psychology revolution, the most popular were Ulric Neisser’s Cognitive Psychology and Don Norman’s Attention and Memory. Today our curiosity is fed more by the public media then mainstream journals. When is the last time you picked up the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal and didn't see an article reporting some behavioral or neuroscience discovery? Not to mention the many Ted talks that are required viewing to stay informed of the exponential growth in so many areas of inquiry. Admittedly our behavioral science has become increasingly interdisciplinary but this does not account for the pervasiveness of many of the innovations and new discoveries in behavioral science in our popular media. A couple dozen articles selected from the New Yorker alone could bring an undergraduate up-to-date on many of the domains of inquiry in our psychological science. Popular books like the one being reviewed here also give behavioral scientists much food for thought.