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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... surface painted two shades of gray, two objects touching side by side, gray cellophane on a white page, an inside or outside corner where two walls meet, or a shadow. Somehow the brain must solve the chicken-and-egg problem of ...
... surface is. A stamp in your palm can project the same square on your retina as a chair across the room or a building miles away (first drawing, page 9). A cutting board viewed head-on can project the same trapezoid as various irregular ...
... Surfaces look grimy and rat-colored to them, killing their appetite and their libido. Still others can see objects change their positions but cannot see them move—a syndrome that a philosopher once tried to convince me was logically ...
... surface of the brain. The organization of our mental modules comes from our genetic program, but that does not mean that there is a gene for every trait or that learning is less important than we used to think. The mind is an adaptation ...
... surfaces—it can make good guesses about what is out there. As we saw earlier, it's impossible to distinguish coal from snow by examining the brightnesses of their retinal projections. But say there is a module for perceiving the ...