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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Steven Pinker. OTHER BOOKS BY STEVEN PINKER Language Learnability and Language Development Visual Cognition (ed.) Connections and Symbols (ed., with Jacques Mehler) Learnability and Cognition Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (ed., with Beth ...
... Visual Arts Center for advice on the jacket art. My editors, Drake McFeely (Norton), Howard Boyer (now at the University of California Press), Stefan McGrath (Penguin), and Ravi Mirchandani (now at Orion), offered fine advice and care ...
... visual field. The smaller numbers come from darker patches, the larger numbers from brighter patches. The numbers shown in the array are the actual signals coming from an electronic camera trained on a person's hand, though they could ...
... visual world into objects, we need to know what they are made of, say, snow versus coal. At first glance the problem looks simple. If large numbers come from bright regions and small numbers come from dark regions, then large number ...
... visual system does much better. Somehow it lets us see the bright outdoor coal as black and the dark indoor snowball as white. That is a happy outcome, because our conscious sensation of color and lightness matches the world as it is ...