Almost 20 years ago, in his book Consilience, the prize-winning biologist E.O. Wilson argued for the unity of all human knowledge. In between writing about ants and island biogeography, Wilson has turned out eloquent and forceful works that compel us to reconsider the origins of human nature, the place of humans in the biosphere and the role of humans in preserving biodiversity in our world.

E.O. Wilson’s rich and provocative The Origins of Creativity singles out creativity—expressed in the stories we tell, the movies we watch, the books we write—as humanity’s defining trait. He locates the origins of creativity in hunter-gatherer societies 1,000 millennia ago when individuals would gather around the campfire to tell stories to entertain themselves or to forge bonds with others in the circle. Focusing on innovation, language, metaphors and irony, Wilson traces the ways that creativity serves as common ground for science and the humanities. The two modes of inquiry still have work to do, for the humanities must still strive to understand the deep genetic origins of consciousness, and science must continue its quest to understand the ancient values and feelings that make us human. He urges a “third enlightenment” in which we recognize that science and the humanities permeate each other. “The act of discovery,” he writes, “is completely a human story and scientific knowledge is the absolutely humanistic product of the human brain.”

Regaling us with stories of his meetings with Nabokov, his encounters with movies that illustrate deep human archetypes (the hero, the quest), and his preferences for the beauty of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby over the social gossip of Jonathan Franzen’s novels, Wilson movingly illustrates the dynamic character and the depths of the creative process.

As a lonely child in London, Daniel Tammet found language baffling; he “thought and felt and sometimes dreamed in a private language of numbers.” But once he learned to read, he found words fascinating and beautiful. (Tammet covered some of this material in his first book, Born on a Blue Day, which detailed his synesthesia and his diagnosis in his 20s of high-functioning autism.) And it is language that Tammet delves into in Every Word Is a Bird We Teach to Sing. A sprightly combination of essays, profiles and reported pieces, the book explores words and language from a variety of angles.

An early chapter describes his attempts as a 19-year-old to teach English to Lithuanian women, ditching the textbook for poetry and wordplay. Other chapters look into nearly lost languages, like Mexico’s Nahuatl language, which a small number of Aztec descendants speak, and from which words like avocado, chocolate and tomato came. Tammet also visits the Isle of Man, an island in the Irish Sea, where a handful of inhabitants work to keep the Celtic Manx language alive. Tammet also weaves in the story of the invented language Esperanto and its creator, the Polish-born Ludwik Zamenhof, who invented the language as a means to simplify Europe’s languages and bring people together.

Tammet also profiles several writers and academics, including the Australian poet Les Murray, who explores Asperger’s syndrome in his poetry. A longtime fan of Murray’s poetry, Tammet translated a volume of Murray’s poetry into French, and he walks the reader through the steps of translating one of his poems.

A book about words and language might sound dry or lofty, but Tammet’s writing is lucid, thoughtful and often funny, drawing readers in and leaving us thinking a little differently about language.