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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... kind of consciousness-raising. We tend to be blasé about our mental lives. We open our eyes, and familiar articles present themselves; we will our limbs to move, and objects and bodies float into place; we awaken from a dream, and ...
... kind of computation. The mind is organized into modules or mental organs, each with a specialized design that makes it an expert in one arena of interaction with the world. The modules' basic logic is specified by our genetic program ...
... kind of mind we have. Evolutionary biology helps us to understand why we have the kind of mind we have. The evolutionary psychology of this book is, in one sense, a straightforward extension of biology, focusing on one organ, the mind ...
... kind of world—an evenly lit world made mostly of rigid parts with smooth, uniformly colored surfaces—it can make good guesses about what is out there. As we saw earlier, it's impossible to distinguish coal from snow by examining the ...
... illumination, of course, but assumptions about bodies in motion. Our common sense about other people is a kind of intuitive psychology—we try to infer people's beliefs and desires from what they Standard Equipment 29.