How the Mind Works"A model of scientific writing: erudite, witty, and clear." —New York Review of Books In this Pulitzer Prize finalist and national bestseller, one of the world's leading cognitive scientists tackles the workings of the human mind. What makes us rational—and why are we so often irrational? How do we see in three dimensions? What makes us happy, afraid, angry, disgusted, or sexually aroused? Why do we fall in love? And how do we grapple with the imponderables of morality, religion, and consciousness? How the Mind Works synthesizes the most satisfying explanations of our mental life from cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and other fields to explain what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and contemplate the mysteries of life. This edition of Pinker's bold and buoyant classic is updated with a new foreword by the author. |
From inside the book
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... animal, tool, and so on), and the record is somehow matched with a retinal image even when the image is distorted in all ... animals, the vehicles designed by natural selection. But legs come with a high price: the software to 10 HOW THE ...
... animals are replicators, and their complicated machinery thus appears to have been engineered to allow them to survive and reproduce. Darwin insisted that his theory explained not just the complexity of an animal's body but the ...
... animals. One could draw the conclusion that all mental activity in all animals is the same. But a better conclusion is that we cannot simply look at a patch of brain and read out the logic in the intricate pattern of connectivity that ...
... animals that have been cross-wired so that the eyes are connected to the auditory brain, that area shows a few hints of the properties of the visual brain.) How the genes control brain development is still unknown, but a reasonable ...
... animals interact socially, and why there is communication. It is as indispensable to researchers in animal behavior as Newton's laws are to mechanical engineers. But almost everyone misunderstands the theory. Contrary to popular belief ...