Steven Pinker MP3 for listening practice. Brilliant

Here's a brilliant speech, excellent listening practice for CPE and good CAE students. I can't attach an mp3 but you can download it from the link below. Here's the blurb from the site and the link:

http://uc.princeton.edu/main/index.php/component/content/article/3330


Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.
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(Jun 5, 2008 at the Royal Society for the encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (RSA))

Chair: Matthew Taylor, chief executive, RSA

For Steven Pinker, the brilliance of the mind lies in the way it uses just two processes to turn the finite building blocks of our language into infinite meanings. The first is metaphor: we take a concrete idea and use it as a stand-in for abstract thoughts. The second is combination: we combine ideas according to rules, like the syntactic rules of language, to create new thoughts out of old ones.

How can a choice of metaphors start a war, impeach a president, or win an election? How does a mind that evolved to think about rocks and plants and enemies think about love and physics and democracy? How do we control the amount of information that we absorb? And what good does this actually do us?

Join Steven Pinker as he tries to answer these questions and many more, unlocking the hidden workings of our thoughts, our emotions and our social relationships and showing us that language really can tell us unexpected and fascinating things about ourselves.

Please be advised that this audio MP3 file contains very strong language.