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. |
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... Psychology. I. Title. QP360.5.P56 1997 153—DC21 97–1855 CIP W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 http://www.wwnorton.com W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WC1A 1PU 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 For ...
... psychology that made this book possible, and thought up many of the theories I present (and many of the better jokes). By inviting me to spend a year as a Fellow of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California ...
... psychology comes from some divine force or mysterious essence or almighty principle. In the Jewish legend of the Golem, a clay figure was animated when it was fed an inscription of the name of God. The archetype is echoed in many robot ...
... psychology” by the anthropologist John Tooby and the psychologist Leda Cosmides. Evolutionary psychology brings together two scientific revolutions. One is the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, which explains the mechanics of ...
... assumptions about illumination, of course, but assumptions about bodies in motion. Our common sense about other people is a kind of intuitive psychology—we try to infer people's beliefs and desires from what they Standard Equipment 29.