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
Results 1-5 of 96
... intelligence, the technology of shape recognition has improved. You may own software that scans in a page, recognizes the printing, and converts it with reasonable accuracy to a file of bytes. But artificial shape recognizers are still ...
... intelligence researchers tried to duplicate common sense in computers, the ultimate blank slate, did the conundrum, now called “the frame problem,” come to light. Yet somehow we all solve the frame problem whenever we use our common ...
... intelligence as part of its very essence. It is a recurring theme in our cultural tradition: Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, Promethean fire and Pandora's box, the rampaging Golem, Faust's bargain, the Sorcerer's ...
... not that the brain is like commercially available computers. Rather, the claim is that brains and computers embody intelligence for some of the same reasons. To explain how birds fly, we invoke principles of 26 HOW THE MIND WORKS.
... intelligence, a capacity to form culture, and multipurpose learning strategies—will surely go the way of protoplasm in biology and of earth, air, fire, and water in physics. These entities are so formless, compared to the exacting ...