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
Every idea in the book may turn out to be wrong, but that would be progress,
because our old ideas were too vapid to be wrong. Second, I have not
discovered what we do know about how the mind works. Few of the ideas in the
pages to ...
Yet the reply captures how centuries of commentators have reacted to the idea of
a richly structured, high-tech mind. And the “interactionist” position, with its
phobia of ever specifying the innate part of the interaction, is not much better.
Look at ...
Philosophers often try to clarify difficult concepts using thought experiments,
outlandish hypothetical situations that help us explore the implications of our
ideas. The Twilight Zone actually staged them for the camera. One of the first
episodes ...
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LibraryThing Review
User Review - SpaceyAcey - LibraryThingPinker explains the computational theory of the mind in easy to understand prose for the layman. It's not all literature summarizing, he also inserts some of his own ideas on all sorts of topics ... Read full review
LibraryThing Review
User Review - raschneid - LibraryThingVery interesting, well-written, and comprehensive. I appreciated the overview of both computational and evolutionary psychology in one tome of a book; computational psychology is pretty much awesome ... Read full review
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Bibliographic information
| Title | How the Mind Works |
| Author | Steven Pinker |
| Publisher | W. W. Norton & Company, 2009 |
| ISBN | 0393069737, 9780393069730 |
| Length | 672 pages |
| Subjects | › › Medical / Neuroscience Psychology / Cognitive Psychology & Cognition Science / Life Sciences / Anatomy & Physiology |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |