The son of a travelling salesman and a housewife, Steven Pinker grew up in Montreal, Canada where he attended McGill University. He specialised in the psychology of perception and received a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Pinker taught at Harvard, Stanford and eventually MIT where he was greatly influenced by the work of MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, particularly by Chomsky's theory that humans emerge into the world fully programmed for grammatical language. Pinker's previous books include the 1994 bestseller The Language Instinct and several academic texts on language development, visual cognition, symbols and semantics.