Students jammed into Professor Steven Pinker’s Core class “The Human Mind” yesterday. The room was so crowded that people overflowed into the hallway, many failing to catch sight of their professor.

Second semester started Wednesday with classrooms filled to their brims, professors scrambling to find additional teaching fellows (TFs) and core classes planning lotteries—even after moving to larger classrooms.

“I never actually entered Emerson 105,” said Hui Hua “Ada” Wan ’07, who tried to attend Science B-62, “The Human Mind” yesterday afternoon. “I just stood outside and was mobbed by equally anxious students.”

TFs for The Human Mind were forced to close the doors on the overflow crowd so that those lucky—or early—enough to grab seats could hear Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker’s first lecture.

Pinker estimated that around 500 people tried to squeeze into Emerson 105’s 300-odd seats—and the room’s aisles.

“It’s a major pain in the neck that there’s no pre-registration so we’re left with this major last-minute disruption,” said Pinker, who authored the best-selling book “The Blank Slate” and was publicly wooed from MIT last year.

A proposal by Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby to have students register for classes during the previous semester was shot down by the Faculty last year.

But at least one student managed to predict that Pinker’s fame would lead to overflow-level interest in The Human Mind—and tried to pre-register herself.

Moira G. Weigel ’06 sent Pinker an e-mail last August asking him to secure her a spot in the course.

“I wrote him some sycophantic and rather awful e-mail to the effect of, ‘Oh, Steven Pinker...please can I be in your class?’” Weigel said.

But the flattering e-mail that Weigel sent last year proved to be no help at 1:30 p.m. yesterday.

“I couldn’t get within hearing distance of the door,” she said.

The course will meet in Science Center B, which holds nearly 500, on Tuesday, but Pinker said yesterday that difficulties with finding qualified TFs will still force him to lottery the course.

Though Human Mind TF Andrew E. Shtulman attributed some of the turnout to Pinker’s name, not only famous professors drew substantial crowds this week.

Robert A. Paarlberg, a visiting professor of government from Wellesley College, entered Government 1790, “American Foreign Policy” only to find a mob scene yesterday afternoon.

“They came today not because they knew anything about me or anything about the course, because both were entirely new,” Paarlberg said.