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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... facts and predict new ones, and that are consistent in their content and in their style of explanation. My goal was to weave the ideas into a cohesive picture using two even bigger ideas that are not mine: the computational theory of ...
... arrangements of matter. This drawing, devised by the psychologists Pawan Sinha and Edward Adelson, appears to show a ring of light gray and dark gray tiles. In fact, it is a rectangular cutout in a black. 6 HOW THE MIND WORKS.
Steven Pinker. In fact, it is a rectangular cutout in a black cover through which you are looking at part of a scene. In the next drawing the cover has been removed, and you can see that each pair of side-by-side gray squares comes from ...
... fact just the pale shade of the picture tube when the set was off. The blackness is a figment, a product of the brain circuitry that ordinarily allows you to see coal as coal. Television engineers exploited that circuitry when they ...
... 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 surely would have opted not ...