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
... true of the mind. The faculty with which we ponder the world has no ability to peer inside itself or our other faculties to see what makes them tick. That makes us the victims of an illusion: that our own psychology comes from some ...
... true, our organs would not work. A jack-of-all-trades is master of none, and that is just as true for our mental organs as for our physical organs. The robot challenge makes that clear. Building a robot poses many software engineering ...
... true of the mind. Whether or not we establish exact boundaries for the components of the mind, it is clear that it is not made of mental Spam but has a heterogeneous structure of many specialized parts. 5. Our. physical organs owe their ...
... true but useless—so blankly uncomprehending, so defiantly incurious, that it is almost as bad to assert them as to deny them. For minds, just as for machines, the metaphors of a mixture of two ingredients, like a martini, or a battle ...
... true. Tooby and Cosmides point out a fundamental consequence of sexual reproduction: every generation, each person's blueprint is scrambled with someone else's. That means we must be qualitatively alike. If two people's genomes had ...