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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... reason there are no humanlike robots is not that the very idea of a mechanical mind is misguided. It is that the engineering problems that we humans solve as we see and walk and plan and make it through the day are far more challenging ...
... the brain is like commercially available computers. Rather, the claim is that brains and computers embody intelligence for some of the same reasons. To explain how birds fly, we invoke principles of 26 HOW THE MIND WORKS.
... reason, the relative importance of innateness and learning is a phony issue. An emphasis on innate design should not, by the way, be confused with the search for “a gene for” this or that mental organ. Think of the genes and putative ...
... reason to think that the quality of engineering progressively deteriorates as the information flows upstream to the faculties that interpret and act on what we see. The adaptationist program in biology, or the careful use of natural ...
... reason that reverse-engineering guided by evolutionary theory should not bring insight about the rest of the mind. An interesting example is a new theory of pregnancy sickness (traditionally called “morning sickness”) by the biologist ...