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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... hated the sight of his grandmother, or if he knew the route had changed, his body would not be on that bus. For millennia this has been a paradox. Entities like “wanting to visit one's grandmother” and 24 HOW THE MIND WORKS.
Steven Pinker. a paradox. Entities like “wanting to visit one's grandmother” and “knowing the bus goes to Grandma's house” are colorless, odorless, and tasteless. But at the same time they are causes of physical events, as potent as any ...
... one's body into the next generation—for, truly, you can't take it with you in this sense above all!” The criterion by which genes get selected is the quality of the bodies they build, but it is the genes making it into the next ...
... one's genes, it would not really be altruism after all, but some kind of hypocrisy. This too is a mixup. Just as blueprints don't necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don't necessarily specify selfish organisms. As we shall ...
... one's wallet—you don't need to crank through a mathematical model, run a computer simulation of a neural network, or hire a professional psychologist; you can just ask your grandmother. It's not that common sense should have any more ...