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
Results 1-5 of 73
... person's hand, though they could just as well be the firing rates of some of the nerve fibers coming from the eye to the brain as a person looks at a hand. For a robot brain—or a human brain—to recognize objects and not bump into them ...
... person in your car, and a gallon of blood in a person, it would be strange to conclude that there is a gallon of blood in your car. Even if you were to craft a set of rules that derived only sensible conclusions, it is no easy matter to ...
... person: he sees his wife as an amazingly convincing impostor. These syndromes are caused by an injury, usually a stroke, to one or more of the thirty brain areas that compose the primate visual system. Some areas specialize in color and ...
... person in a world that is not blanketed with sunshine but illuminated by a cunningly arranged patchwork of light. If the surface-perception module assumes that illumination is even, it should be seduced into hallucinating objects that ...
... person's head the way we smell oranges. If we did not see the social world through the lens of that assumption, we would be like the Samaritan I robot, which sacrificed itself for a bag of lima beans, or like Samaritan II, which went ...