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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... biological evolution. Tooby and Cosmides point out a delicious irony. The eye, that most uncontroversial example of ... biology, or the careful use of natural selection to reverse-engineer the parts of an organism, is sometimes ridiculed ...
... biologically growable. The logic of reverse-engineering has guided researchers in visual perception for over a century, and that may be why we understand vision better than we understand any other part of the mind. 38 HOW THE MIND WORKS.
... biological fitness. Until recently, scientists with an evolutionary bent felt a responsibility to account for acts that seem like Darwinian suicide, such as celibacy, adoption, and contraception. Perhaps, they ventured, celibate people ...
... biology and culture. Biology endows humans with the five senses, a few drives 44 HOW THE MIND WORKS.
Steven Pinker. ture. Biology endows humans with the five senses, a few drives like hunger and fear, and a general capacity to learn. But biological evolution, according to the SSSM, has been superseded by cultural evolution. Culture is ...