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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... people are unaffected by their experiences. And because this research can measure only the ways in which people differ, it says little about the design of the mind that all normal people share. But by showing how many ways the mind can ...
... people and places. The module has been unmasked; it does not apprehend the nature of things but relies on a cheat-sheet. That cheat-sheet is so deeply embedded in the ... people's beliefs and desires from what they Standard Equipment 29.
Steven Pinker. ogy—we try to infer people's beliefs and desires from what they do, and try to predict what they will ... people have beliefs and desires; we cannot sense a belief or desire in another person's head the way we smell oranges ...
... People hold many beliefs that are at odds with their experience but were true in the environment in which we evolved ... peoples of the world share an astonishingly detailed universal psychology. But if the mind has a complex innate ...
... people's minds might work a bit better in certain ways than other people's minds. The evidence suggests that humans everywhere on the planet see, talk, and think about objects and people in the same basic way. The difference between ...