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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... evolved wheels and cite the fact as an example of how evolution is often incapable of finding the optimal solution to an engineering problem. But it is not a good example at all. Even if nature could have evolved a moose on wheels, it ...
... , but that does not mean that everything we think, feel, and do is biologically adaptive. We evolved from apes, but that does not mean we have the same minds as apes. And the ultimate goal of natural selection is to Standard Equipment 23.
... evolved in and how it reflects light. If the visual brain “assumes” that it is living in a certain kind of world—an evenly lit world made mostly of rigid parts with smooth, uniformly colored surfaces—it can make good guesses about what ...
... evolved. We could have evolved like the Samaritan I robot, which sacrificed itself to save a sack of lima beans, or like dung beetles, which must find dung delicious, or like the masochist in the old joke about sadomasochism (Masochist ...
... evolved dozens of toxins in their tissues: insecticides, insect repellents, irritants, paralytics, poisons, and other sand to throw in herbivores' gears. Herbivores have in turn evolved countermeasures, such as a liver to detoxify the ...