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 86
... matters. Thanks go also to Marianne Teuber and to Sabrina Detmar and Jennifer Riddell of MIT's List Visual Arts Center for advice on the jacket art. My editors, Drake McFeely (Norton), Howard Boyer (now at the University of California ...
... matter of psychology. For I believe that the discovery by cognitive science and artificial intelligence of the technical challenges overcome by our mundane mental activity is one of the great revelations of science, an awakening of the ...
... arrangements of matter. This drawing, devised by the psychologists Pawan Sinha and Edward Adelson, appears to show a ring of light gray and dark gray tiles. In fact, it is a rectangular cutout in a black. 6 HOW THE MIND WORKS.
... matter to use them all to guide behavior intelligently. Clearly a thinker cannot apply just one rule at a time. A match gives light; a saw cuts wood; a locked door is opened with a key. But we laugh at the man who lights a match to peer ...
... matter to accomplish these improbable outcomes, and you begin to see through the illusion. Sight and action and common sense and violence and morality and love are no accident, no inextricable ingredients of an intelligent essence, no ...