“He’s probably the best lecturer I’ve had here so far. He just knows everything. He’s the man,” adds Helen V. Chou ’04, who also took the course.

But praise for “The Human Mind” was not universal.

Melissa Lo ’04 says that though the class covered a broad range of theories, “nothing [was] totally in depth.”

“Pinker is like a mechanical lecturer who knows the stuff that he’s talking about really well to the extent that it seems that it’s really rehearsed,” she says.

Students did complain about the course’s heavy workload—its four one-page papers, two 10-page papers, midterm and final made it one of the most work-intensive Core courses—but they said it was not enough to dissuade them from taking the course.

“It was a lot of work but I feel like it was worth it to be part of his class. In retrospect though I would’ve taken a lighter class load in another class to compensate for his class,” says Andrew P. Brecher ’07.

But “The Human Mind” Head Teaching Fellow Nedim T. Sahin notes that the course has a lighter workload—by one research paper—than the “Introduction to Psychology” course Pinker taught at MIT, on which “The Human Mind” is modeled.

THE PINKER MIND

Lindsley Professor of Psychology Stephen M. Kosslyn says that what sets Pinker apart from his peers is “a happy intersection of intelligence, clear-headedness, perspective and energy level.” “He knows how to make science fun,” Kosslyn says.

Psychology Department Chair and Kenan Professor of Psychology Daniel L. Schacter adds that Pinker has an uncanny ability to unite two divergent worlds.

“He combines the roles of scientist and scholar very nicely,” he says. “He combines on the one hand scientific strength so that he’s made important contribution to the scientific analysis of human language and he puts that together with the broadly scholarly perspective that you see in his book.”

But Pinker’s ability to bridge two other worlds—those of academia and the general public—may prove to be one of his greatest legacies.

His books are both basic texts in the field of psychology and number one bestsellers. Indeed, his course website, which contains links to several of his articles in scholarly journals and lists his fields of research—including “inflectionary morphology” and “neuroimaging of inflection”—also prominently displays on its cover page a cartoon caricature of Pinker, his signature hair dominating the rest of his features.

Pinker cites his colleagues and students as the best part of being at Harvard. When asked how long he plans to stay at Harvard, the tenured Pinker’s response was characteristically simple yet meaningful.

“Forever, I hope,” he said.

—Staff writer William C. Marra can be reached at wmarra@fas.harvard.edu.