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
Results 1-5 of 91
... understand how the mind works—not nearly as well as we understand how the body works, and certainly not well enough to design utopia or to cure unhappiness. Then why the audacious title? The linguist Noam Chomsky once suggested that our ...
... understanding and outmaneuvering objects, animals, plants, and other people. The summary can be unpacked into several claims. The mind is what the brain does; specifically, the brain processes information, and thinking is a kind of ...
... understand that the metal ring is designed to hold the olive, and the lever lowers an X-shaped blade through one end, pushing the pit out through the other end. The shapes and arrangements of the springs, hinges, blades, levers, and ...
... understanding. The mind is an exquisitely organized system that accomplishes remarkable feats no engineer can duplicate ... understand why we have the kind of mind we have. The evolutionary psychology of this book is, in one sense, a ...
... understanding the mind! Programs are assemblies of simple information-processing units—tiny circuits that can add, match a pattern, turn on some other circuit, or do other elementary logical and mathematical operations. What those ...