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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... input is the retinal image, and the output is a specification of the objects in the world and what they are made of—that is, what we know we are seeing. And there's the rub. Inverse optics is what engineers call an “illposed problem ...
... inputs, not less. Yet the reply captures how centuries of commentators have reacted to the idea of a richly structured ... input. When trying to understand how a car works, one cannot neglect the engine or the gasoline or the driver. All ...
... input firings from connected neurons is another. Since the brain is destined to be an organ of computation, it would be surprising if the genome did not exploit the capacity of neural tissue to process information during brain assembly ...
... input they get during critical periods in development. 5. Our. organs of computation are a product of natural selection. The biologist Richard Dawkins called natural selection the Blind Watchmaker; in the case of the mind, we can call it ...
... input symbols and output symbols could correspond, depending on the details of the machine, to any one of a vast number of sensible interpretations. The machine consists of a tape divided into squares, a read-write head that can print ...