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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... mental images to romantic love, have recently been upgraded to problems (though there are still some mysteries, too!). Every idea in the book may turn out to be wrong, but that would be progress, because our old ideas were too vapid to ...
... mental life we take for granted. The reason there are no humanlike robots is not that the very idea of a mechanical mind is misguided. It is that the engineering problems that we humans solve as we see and walk and plan and make it ...
... mental software, will have to burrow a considerable way into the mountain before meeting the neurobiologists tunneling through from the other side. The computational theory of mind is not the same thing as the despised “computer ...
... mental organs as for our physical organs. The robot challenge makes that clear. Building a robot poses many software engineering problems, and different tricks are necessary to solve them. Take our first problem, the sense of sight. A ...
... mental modules need their own cheat-sheets to solve their unsolvable problems. A physicist who wants to figure out how the body moves when muscles are contracted has to solve problems in kinematics (the geometry of motion) and dynamics ...