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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... question is about the machines that walk, talk, see, Karel and Cˇapek think, coined often better the than their human masters. Since 1920, when word robot in his play R.U.R., dramatists have freely conjured them up: Speedy, Cutie, and ...
... questions such as apartheid, the death penalty, and working mothers, and in their career choices, hobbies, vices, religious commitments, and tastes in dating. Identical twins are far more alike than fraternal twins, who share only half ...
... questions we long to answer. Neuroscientists like to point out that all parts of the cerebral cortex look pretty much alike—not only the different parts of the human brain, but the brains of different animals. One could draw the ...
... questions in English, give us a hint of the finesse and power of which computation is capable. Human thought and behavior, no matter how subtle and flexible, could be the product of a very complicated program, and that program may have ...
... questions of terminology, and anatomists and physiologists have not wasted their time on them. What is clear is that the body is not made of Spam but has a heterogeneous structure of many specialized parts. All this is likely to be true ...