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
Results 1-5 of 68
... experience, until neurological disease dissects them for us. Another expansion of our vista comes from the startling similarities between identical twins, who share the genetic recipes that build the mind. Their minds are astonishingly ...
... experiences. And because this research can measure only the ways in which people differ, it says little about the design of the mind that all normal people share. But by showing how many ways the mind can vary in its innate structure ...
... experience but were true in the environment in which we evolved, and they pursue goals that subvert their own well-being but were adaptive in that environment. And contrary to the widespread belief that cultures can vary arbitrarily and ...
... experience,” as it all can take place in the pitch-black womb, sometimes before the rods and cones are functioning, and many mammals can see almost perfectly as soon as they are born. It is more like a kind of genetic data compression ...
... experience. Since the modern mind is adapted to the Stone Age, not the computer age, there is no need to strain for adaptive explanations for everything we do. Our ancestral environment lacked the institutions that now entice us to ...