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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... example, it gives a false alarm to the R shown in the first square below. And it fails to see P's that are there; for example, it misses the letter when it is shifted, tilted, slanted, too far, too near, or too fancy: P P Detector And ...
... 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 surely would have opted not to. Wheels ...
Steven Pinker. example of a well-defined one: “bachelor.” A bachelor, of 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 ...
... example, the visual world is not simply blurred or riddled with holes. Selected aspects of visual experience are removed while others are left intact. Some patients see a complete world but pay attention only to half of it. They eat ...
... example, a silicon circuit is faster than a neural circuit, but a neural circuit can match a larger pattern than a silicon one. These differences ripple up through the programs built from the circuits and affect how quickly and easily ...