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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... organism at least as complicated as itself. The raft stopped, revolving slowly, a few inches above the water. “Drop it,” cried Macintosh. The raft hit the water with a sharp report. Sinson and Samaritan sat perfectly still. Gradually ...
... organisms (for example, meiosis and sex cause the offspring of two people to have fifty percent of their genes in common); our emotions about kin use a kind of inverse genetics to guess which of the organisms we interact with are likely ...
... Organisms also change over the eons because of statistical accidents in who lives and who dies, environmental catastrophes that wipe out whole families of creatures, and the unavoidable by-products of changes that are the product of ...
... organism appears as if it was designed to see well now because it owes its existence to the success of its ancestors in seeing well in the past. (This point will be expanded in Chapter 3.) Many people acknowledge that natural selection ...
... organisms. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is to build a selfless brain. Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players. Psychological Correctness The evolutionary psychology of ...