Let’s move on to your first choice, Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct, which looks at how children learn language.

I chose this book because I thought it was a model example of a scientist taking quite a complicated area of science – the nature of language – and communicating it to a wider public in a very accessible way. He looks at it from every angle. He puts language on the table, as it were, and looks at it from the perspective of not just linguistics, but neuroscience as well – that is, how the brain is capable of generating language or understanding it. He also looks at evolution, whether human beings are the only species that have language, and how a language development can go wrong in different people.

How does that tie in with empathy, because I would have thought that language is a very important tool in empathising with people?

Yes, there is a strong link between language and empathy, but I think you can have empathy without language. The clearest example of that can be seen if you look at typically developing children, even before they have got language. Towards the end of the first year of life they are very actively looking at people’s faces and emotional expressions and they are modifying their behaviour based on how they see other people are reacting. They interpret other people’s faces. All of that is happening before a child even has words.

This is a problem with some people who are autistic because they can’t read people’s facial expressions.

Yes, one of the earliest signs of autism is just at that same time, between 12 and 24 months old. They are not looking at faces as much, and even if they are they are not reacting to people’s emotional expressions in the usual way. And that may be even if language is developing. These give us clues that language and empathy are independent. But you are absolutely right that once we have language it can facilitate the development of empathy because once you can understand what people are saying, their words can also be used as evidence of what they are thinking and feeling. It gives you a second source of information and helps you put yourself in their shoes and imagine what is going on in their mind. So you can imagine, in a typical child, that empathy really takes off in the early years, not just because of the empathy circuit in the brain developing, but also because language is facilitating it.

Your next book, Brain Gender by Melissa Hines, takes a look at what factors influence our brain.

I have had a long-standing admiration for Melissa Hines’s research. She has been looking at the controversial topic of human sex differences over many decades. This book brings together not just her own research, but also her integration of the field. It is looking at a very fundamental question – is there a difference between males and females when it comes to the mind and ultimately the brain?

And she thinks there is, but to differing degrees.

Yes, and she is a very moderate scientist because she is the first to recognise that many of these differences could just be the result of the way our society is organised and the different social experiences that boys and girls have as they grow up. So she is not an extreme biological determinist. On the other hand, she does recognise that biology does play a role. Her best evidence for that is a group of children that she has been studying that have a medical condition called Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia. These are girls who produce too much testosterone for reasons of genetic mutation. She looks at their behaviour and finds that many of these girls show “tomboy” behaviour. She finds that they seem to be more interested in male typical interests, in terms of their choice of activities when they play as children. And increasingly it is possible to use MRI [magnetic resonance imaging] to look at their brains. She shows some evidence that our prenatal biology, particularly the hormone testosterone, also influences our patterns of behaviour and how the brain develops.