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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... memories fade? How does makeup change the look of a face? Where do ethnic stereotypes come from, and when are they irrational? Why do people lose their tempers? What makes children bratty? Why do fools fall in love? What makes us laugh ...
... memory, the circuitry underlying a psychological module might be distributed across the brain in a spatially haphazard manner. And mental modules need not be tightly sealed off from one another, communicating only through a few narrow ...
... memory, motor control, intelligence, or other complete mental systems, and there probably won't ever be. The reason was summed up by the politician Sam Rayburn: Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one ...
... memory storage as they need, we can program them to produce the same outputs in response to the same inputs. Still other kinds of symbol-processors have been proposed as models of the human mind. These models are often simulated on ...
... memory board and post notices of their own, in turn triggering other demons, and so on, the information in memory changes and eventually contains the correct output for a given input. Some demons are connected to sense organs and are ...