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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... innate structure, the discoveries open our eyes to how much structure the mind must have. Reverse-Engineering the Psyche The complex structure of the mind is the subject of this book. Its key idea can be captured in a sentence: The mind ...
... innately structured), but many lines of evidence converge on it. The one that most impresses me is the Robot Challenge. Each of the major engineering problems solved by the mind is unsolvable without built-in assumptions about the laws ...
... innate structure, that does not mean that learning is unimportant. Framing the issue in such a way that innate structure and learning are pitted against each other, either as alternatives or, almost as bad, as complementary ingredients ...
... innate machinery designed to do the learning. The claim that there are several innate modules is a claim that there are several innate learning machines, each of which learns according to a particular logic. To understand learning, we ...
... innate design should not, by the way, be confused with the search for “a gene for” this or that mental organ. Think of the genes and putative genes that have made the headlines: genes for muscular dystrophy, Huntington's disease ...