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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... parents and is in high school. David is 17 years old. He left home at 13, started a small business, and is now a successful young entrepreneur leading a playboy's lifestyle in his penthouse apartment. Eli and Edgar are homosexual lovers ...
... parents as you do, treat the person as if their genetic wellbeing overlaps with yours). I will return to all these topics in later chapters. The mind has to be built out of specialized parts because it has to solve specialized problems ...
... parent of a program will sometimes tout it as a mere demo of an amazingly powerful general-purpose system to be built in the future, but everyone else in the field routinely writes off such hype. I predict that no one will ever build a ...
... parents treat their sons and daughters differently: they touch, comfort, breast-feed, indulge, and talk to boys and girls in unequal amounts. Imagine that this behavior has long-term consequences on the children, which include all the ...
... parents' bedroom and killed them with a shotgun. After several months of showing off their new Porsches and Rolexes, they confessed to the shootings. Their lawyers argued the case to a hung jury by claiming selfdefense, despite the fact ...