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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... mind is misguided. It is that the engineering problems that we humans solve as we see and walk and plan and make it through the day are far more challenging than landing on the moon or sequencing the human genome. Nature, once again ...
... the data packet heard round the world and risk early martyrdom? And what would prevent the coalition from being undermined by silicon draft-dodgers and conscientious objectors? Aggression, like every 16 HOW THE MIND WORKS.
... mind. Their minds are astonishingly alike, and not just in gross measures like IQ and personality traits like neuroticism and introversion. They are alike in talents such as spelling and mathematics, in opinions on questions such as ...
... mind is an exquisitely organized system that accomplishes remarkable feats no engineer can duplicate. How could the ... mind is possible and what kind of mind we have. Evolutionary biology helps us to understand why we have the kind of ...
... mind has to be built out of specialized parts because it has to solve specialized problems. Only an angel could be a general problemsolver; we mortals have to make fallible guesses from fragmentary information. Each of our mental ...