In the two pages, the author tried to state his opinion that “humans are hard-wired to learn language. Language learning ability is built in the human brain”. He firstly presented the result of a research by Dr. Steven Pinker that, as children, we are programmed to learn a language. Then he quoted the words of Dr. Steven Pinker ‘The brain can hear speech content in sounds that have only the remotest resemblance to speech…because phonetic perception is like the sixth sense’. Dr. Steven Pinker gave the research outcome in his book “The Language Instinct”.  Dr. Steven Pinker was born in 1954 in Canada. He is an experimental psychologist. He interested in all aspects of language, mind, and human nature. He conducts research on a variety of topics in psychology and cognitive science, including common knowledge(things that everyone knows everyone knows), language acquisition, emotion, the moral sense, rationality, and trends in violence. He worked as a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. I think he is also an excellent photographer. I have seen many pictures taken by Dr. Steven Pinker, including scenery, animals, buildings, Etc. All of them are fascinating especially the animals pictures. Those animals all seem elegant and beautiful. I also noticed that lighthouse often appeared in his pictures. It might be in his unconscious, he wants himself to be like a lighthouse, shining light on the darkness of human minds. Steven Pinker published his book “The Instinct Language” in 1994 , and immediately became famous in the world.
          “The Third Ear” referenced two opinions of Dr. Steven Pinker. The First opinion is that, as children, the human brain is programmed to learn language. It is like pigeons are programmed to find their way home. I agree with this opinion. I think not only the human brain but human voice generating organs including face, lip, tongue,teeth, throat are all programmed to learn and speak language. Babies came to the world, totally blank, just in several months, they started to understand what was said to them. Just in one year, they can begin to speak, to express what they want, howthey feel. If it is not genetic, it can not imagine. We can see those pets, like cats or dogs, they stayed with people for a few years, but they still could not speak. Obviously, human are naturally gifted to learn a language, at least when they are children they can learn the first language even the second language easily. The problem is, when humans grew into adults, did the language learning talent disappear or not? I think that if it did not disappear completely, the rest must be very little. This talent grew weaker and weaker. Based on someone’s research, the language learning talent does not exist after a baby grew to six years old.  If not so, it is difficult to explain that a mass of adults across the world are all struggling to learn a second language. Those successful language learners are really little compared to all the learners. These successful learners must have some methods, tools, strategies to restore hard-wire to learn a new language. If we want to learn a second language, we should learn the language acquisition method first.
       The second opinion is that humans have a sixth sense to perceive phonetic sounds. It is actually I think. We hear sounds whether they are coming from speech or from the environment like the wind, the animals or the machine. we pick up the patterns of the sounds then match them to the language patterns in our memory. Then it is as if we hear speech in the environment. Or in another words, human trend to hear language, language elements from the environment. For instance, there is a kind of bird in China , they sing similar to the pronunciation of a Chinese word “布谷- bugu “ , so in China, this kind of bird is called “布谷”. It is like human’s another feature. When we see something, we like to match the patterns in our memory. Like when we see the clouds in the sky, We often feel they are like a horse or a lion or something else. Is this feature  good or bad for us to learn a new language? I do not know. I feel it is not that good. I think it is not good. I feel it makes us more stick to our first language but not pick up the second language. Maybe there are some techniques that can make it beneficial for us to learn a second language. If we understand the techniques, maybe we can learn a second language like a baby.
        As for voice recognition system, We can even use voice recognition system to help us to learn a language today. It is a great achievement.