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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... course, robots that weld or spray-paint on assembly lines and that roll through laboratory hallways; my question is about the machines that walk, talk, see, Karel and Cˇapek think, coined often better the than their human masters. Since ...
... course, is simply an adult human male who has never been married. But now imagine that a friend asks you to invite some bachelors to her party. What would happen if you used the definition to decide which of the following people to ...
... course, can be misinterpreted in many ways, such as by imagining a gene for leaving little love notes around the house or by concluding that people are unaffected by their experiences. And because this research can measure only the ways ...
... course, from Charles Darwin. He showed how “organs of extreme perfection and complication, which justly excite our admiration” arise not from God's foresight but from the evolution of replicators over immense spans of time. As ...
... assumptions about illumination, of course, but assumptions about bodies in motion. Our common sense about other people is a kind of intuitive psychology—we try to infer people's beliefs and desires from what they Standard Equipment 29.