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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... shape. When an object appears, its projection on the retina would fit its own template like a round peg in a round hole. The template would be labeled with the name of the shape—in this case, “the letter P”—and whenever a shape matches ...
... shape recognition has improved. You may own software that scans in a page, recognizes the printing, and converts it with reasonable accuracy to a file of bytes. But artificial shape recognizers are still no match for the ones in our ...
... shapes, and weights, from a log to a millet seed. “Man handles them all,” Galen noted, “as well as if his hands had ... shape and keep it there as the load tries to bend it back. Think of lifting a milk carton. Too loose a grasp, and ...
... shape, material, and illumination projects the mosaic of colors we call the retinal image. Optics is a well-understood subject, put to use in drawing, photography, television engineering, and more recently, computer graphics and virtual ...
... shape and substance when its cells respond to some kind of information in its neighborhood that unlocks a different ... shapes of the molecular locks and keys that the cell engages, from mechanical tugs and shoves from neighboring cells ...