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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... theories that strike me as offering a special insight into our thoughts and feelings, that fit the facts and predict new ones ... theory of the natural selection of replicators. The opening chapter presents the big picture: that the mind ix.
... theory explained not just the complexity of an animal's body but the complexity of its mind. “Psychology will be based on a new foundation,” he famously predicted at the end of The Origin of Species. But Darwin's prophecy has not yet ...
... theory of mind thus allows us to keep beliefs and desires in our explanations of behavior while planting them squarely in the physical universe. It allows meaning to cause and be caused. The computational theory of mind is indispensable ...
... theory of mind is not the same thing as the despised “computer metaphor.” As many critics have pointed out, computers are serial, doing one thing at a time; brains are parallel, doing millions of things at once. Computers are fast ...
... 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 Margie Profet. Many pregnant women become nauseated and ...