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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... thought up many of the theories I present (and many of the better jokes). By inviting me to spend a year as a Fellow of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, they provided an ideal ...
... thought processes and see them as artifacts of how our minds were put together rather than as inescapable laws of the universe. Man's capacity for evil is never far from our minds, and it is easy to think that evil just comes along with ...
... thought automation was keen Till you were replaced by a ten-ton machine. It was a computer that tore us apart, dear, Automation broke my heart. . . . It was automation, I'm told, That's why I got fired and I'm out in the cold. How could ...
... thought and emotion in terms of information and computation. The other is the revolution in evolutionary biology of the 1960s and 1970s, which explains the complex adaptive design of living things in terms of selection among replicators ...
... thought to be extrapolations that the untutored masses might draw, so the dangerous ideas must themselves be ... thoughts. Every human act involving another living being is both the subject matter of psychology and the subject matter of ...