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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... problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and ...
... problems, and thus is packed with high-tech systems each contrived to overcome its own obstacles. I begin by laying out these problems, which are both design specs for a robot and the subject matter of psychology. For I believe that the ...
... problem of identifying three-dimensional objects from the patches on the retina and determining what each patch is (shadow or paint, crease or overlay, clear or opaque) from knowledge of what object the patch is part of. The ...
... problem is seeing in depth. Our eyes squash the threedimensional world into a pair of two-dimensional retinal images, and the third dimension must be reconstituted by the brain. But there are no telltale signs in the patches on the ...
Steven Pinker. And these problems arise with a nice, crisp letter of the alphabet. Imagine trying to design a ... problem. But it is not a good example at all. Even if nature could have evolved a moose on wheels, it surely would ...