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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... social relations (family, lovers, rivals, friends, acquaintances, allies, enemies). A final chapter discusses our higher callings: art, music, literature, humor, religion, and philosophy. There is no chapter on language; my previous ...
... social and cognitive sciences has been, I think, a barrier to understanding. The mind is an exquisitely organized system that accomplishes remarkable feats no engineer can duplicate. How could the forces that shaped that system, and the ...
... social world, and sometimes command information that was never presented to them. People hold many beliefs that are at odds with their experience but were true in the environment in which we evolved, and they pursue goals that subvert ...
... tradition, which Tooby and Cosmides have dubbed the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM). The SSSM proposes a fundamental division between biology and culture. Biology endows humans with the five senses, a few drives 44 HOW THE MIND WORKS.
... Social Darwinists,” an allusion to the nineteenth-century movement that justified social inequality as part of the wisdom of nature. Even one of sociobiology's distinguished practitioners, the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, said, “I ...