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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... light. Yet somehow we all solve the frame problem whenever we use our common sense. 5. Imagine. that we have somehow overcome these challenges and have a machine with sight, motor coordination, and common sense. Now we must figure out how ...
... light in a fiber optic cable, to electromagnetic waves, and then back again in reverse order. In a similar sense, the message stays the same when she repeats it to your father at the other end of the couch after it has changed its form ...
... light. If the visual brain “assumes” that it is living in a certain kind of world—an evenly lit world made mostly of rigid parts with smooth, uniformly colored surfaces—it can make good guesses about what is out there. As we saw earlier ...
... light. If the surface-perception module assumes that illumination is even, it should be seduced into hallucinating objects that aren't there. Could that really happen? It happens every day. We call these hallucinations slide shows and ...
... light and sound and particles that physicists can measure do not lawfully predict a person's behavior. What does predict Sally's behavior, and predict it well, is whether she believes herself to be in danger. Sally's beliefs are, of ...