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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... head-on can project the same trapezoid as various irregular shards held at a slant (second drawing, page 9). You can feel the force of this fact of geometry, and of the neural mechanism that copes with it, by staring at a lightbulb for ...
... heads. The artificial ones are designed for pristine, easy-torecognize worlds and not the squishy, jumbled real world. The funny numbers at the bottom of checks were carefully drafted to have shapes that don't overlap and are printed ...
... goes to church, her head goes with her. If Doug is in the house, he must have gone in through some opening unless he was born there and never left. If Sheila is alive ., at 9 A she was also alive at noon. Standard Equipment 13.
... head. In four neat movements it measured the size of his skull, then paused, computing. Then, with a decisive click, it rolled sideways off the raft and sank without hesitation to the bottom of the tank. But as the Samaritan II robots ...
... head into a cascade of neurons firing and chemicals diffusing across synapses. Likewise, a given program can run on computers made of vacuum tubes, electromagnetic switches, transistors, integrated circuits, or well-trained pigeons, and ...