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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... color and lightness matches the world as it is rather than the world as it presents itself to the eye. The snowball is soft and wet and prone to melt whether it is indoors or out, and we see it as white whether it is indoors or out. The ...
... color of the room's walls and was proving that the wheels would turn more revolutions than there are wheels on the wagon, when the bomb went off. Version 3 was programmed to distinguish between relevant implications and irrelevant ones ...
... color, but they do not see the world as an arty black-and-white movie. Surfaces look grimy and rat-colored to them, killing their appetite and their libido. Still others can see objects change their positions but cannot see them move—a ...
... color and form, others in where an object is, others in what an object is, still others in how it moves. A seeing robot cannot be built with just the fish-eye viewfinder of the movies, and it is no surprise to discover that humans were ...
... colors we call the retinal image. Optics is a well-understood subject, put to use in drawing, photography, television engineering, and more recently, computer graphics and virtual reality. But the brain must solve the opposite problem ...