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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... evolution and psychology that made this book possible, and thought up many of the theories I present (and many of the better jokes). By inviting me to spend a year as a Fellow of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University ...
... evolutionary history. The various problems for our ancestors were subtasks of one big problem for their genes, maximizing the number of copies that made it into the next generation. On this view, psychology is engineering in reverse. In ...
... evolutionary psychology” by the anthropologist John Tooby and the psychologist Leda Cosmides. Evolutionary psychology brings together two scientific revolutions. One is the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, which explains the ...
Steven Pinker. dare to seek an evolutionary explanation of how some part of the mind works. It is because they botch the job ... psychologists have to look outside psychology if they want to explain what the parts of the mind are for. To ...
... evolution. Evolution is a conservative process, to be sure, but it can't be all that ... evolutionary adaptation is not to say that all behavior is adaptive in ... psychology from the school of thought in the 1970s and 1980s called ...