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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... things, goalschedulers, conflict-resolvers, and many others. Any explanation of how the mind works that alludes hopefully to some single master force or mind-bestowing elixir like “culture,” “learning,” or “self-organization” begins to ...
... things comes, of course, from Charles Darwin. He showed how “organs of extreme perfection and complication, which justly excite our admiration” arise not from God's foresight but from the evolution of replicators over immense spans of ...
... things in terms of selection among replicators. The two ideas make a powerful combination. Cognitive science helps us to understand how a mind is possible and what kind of mind we have. Evolutionary biology helps us to understand why we ...
... thing the brain does, which makes us see, think, feel, choose, and act. That special thing is information processing ... things for the same reasons. This insight, first expressed by the mathematician Alan Turing, the computer scientists ...
... things via our sense organs, and because of what they do once they are triggered. If the bits of matter that ... thing. In the same way that all books are physically just different combinations of the same seventy-five or so characters ...