https://mosaicscience.com/story/pinker/
“Does any kind of spirituality, however non-religiously defined, play a role in his life?
“I’m afraid of using the word ‘spiritual’,” he says. “I mean, I have a sense of awe and wonder – a sense of intellectual vertigo in pondering certain questions. I hesitate to use the word ‘spiritual’ just because it comes with so much baggage about the supernatural.”
Pinker’s next book, The Sense of Style, will be a style manual for writers incorporating insights from cognitive psychology and linguistics. For example, it will offer advice on how to get around “the curse of knowledge” – the difficulty writers face in being unable to place themselves in the mind of a reader who doesn’t already know as much as the writer knows. Or the question of how to relate to one’s imagined reader: insights from psychology, Pinker will argue, show that the appropriate metaphor to keep in mind is one of vision – that “the stance you take as a writer ought to be to pretend that you’re pointing out something in the world that your reader could see with his own eyes if only he were given an unobstructed view”.!
How my heart sings 