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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... sides to every debate, because they would have made the book unreadable, indeed, unliftable. My conclusions come from assessments of the convergence of evidence from different fields and methods, and I have provided detailed citations ...
... side-by-side gray squares comes from a different arrangement of objects. in front of another object, dark paper lying on light paper, a surface painted two shades of gray, two objects touching side by side, gray cellophane on a white ...
... side chuck (to turn a key), a squeeze grip (to hold a hammer), a disc grip (to open a jar), and a spherical grip (to hold a ball). Each grip needs a precise combination of muscle tensions that mold the hand into the right shape and keep ...
... side effects as well. But a thinker cannot crank out predictions about all the side effects, either. The philosopher Daniel Dennett asks us to imagine a robot designed to fetch a spare battery from a room that also contained a time bomb ...
... side of the plate, shave only the right cheek, and draw a clock with twelve digits squished into the right half. Other patients lose their sensation of color, but they do not see the world as an arty black-and-white movie. Surfaces look ...