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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Each is a tour de force, wrought by a high level of targeted design. Hidden
behind the panels of consciousness must lie fantastically complex machinery—
optical analyzers, motion guidance systems, simulations of the world, databases
on ...
For minds, just as for machines, the metaphors of a mixture of two ingredients,
like a martini, or a battle between matched forces, like a tugof-war, are
wrongheaded ways of thinking about a complex device designed to process
information. Yes ...
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LibraryThing Review
User Review - SpaceyAcey - LibraryThingPinker explains the computational theory of the mind in easy to understand prose for the layman. It's not all literature summarizing, he also inserts some of his own ideas on all sorts of topics ... Read full review
LibraryThing Review
User Review - raschneid - LibraryThingVery interesting, well-written, and comprehensive. I appreciated the overview of both computational and evolutionary psychology in one tome of a book; computational psychology is pretty much awesome ... Read full review
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Bibliographic information
| Title | How the Mind Works |
| Author | Steven Pinker |
| Publisher | W. W. Norton & Company, 2009 |
| ISBN | 0393069737, 9780393069730 |
| Length | 672 pages |
| Subjects | › › Medical / Neuroscience Psychology / Cognitive Psychology & Cognition Science / Life Sciences / Anatomy & Physiology |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |