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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... effects of an action but the side effects as well. But a thinker cannot crank out predictions about all the side effects, either. The philosopher Daniel Dennett asks us to imagine a robot designed to fetch a spare battery from a room ...
... effects of the genes have been documented in scores of studies and show up no matter how one tests for them: by comparing twins reared apart and reared together, by comparing identical and fraternal twins, or by comparing adopted and ...
... effects of forces). But a brain that has to figure out how to contract muscles to get the body to move has to solve problems in inverse kinematics and inverse dynamics— what forces to apply to an object to get it to move in a certain ...
... effects in which to attain it, and goes on to specify what kinds of designs are better suited to attain it than others. Unfortunately for those who think that the departments in a university reflect meaningful divisions of knowledge, it ...
... effect of hormones, there is no reason that hormones should induce nausea and food aversions rather than, say, hyperactivity, aggressiveness, or lust. The Freudian explanation is equally unsatisfying: that pregnancy sickness represents ...