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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... mothers, and in their career choices, hobbies, vices, religious commitments, and tastes in dating. Identical twins are far more alike than fraternal twins, who share only half their genetic recipes, and most strikingly, they are almost ...
... mother in another city, the message stays the same as it goes from your lips to her ears even as it physically changes its form, from vibrating air, to electricity in a wire, to charges in silicon, to flickering light in a fiber optic ...
... mothers have endured inane theories blaming them for every dysfunction or difference in their children (mixed messages cause schizophrenia, coldness causes autism, domineering causes homosexuality, lack of boundaries causes anorexia ...
... that correlate with the state of the world as it is captured in the propositions. These symbols cannot be English words and sentences, notwithstanding the popular misconception that we think in our mother tongue. Thinking Machines 69.
Steven Pinker. standing the popular misconception that we think in our mother tongue. As I showed in The Language Instinct, sentences in a spoken language like English or Japanese are designed for vocal communication between impatient ...