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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... logical and statistical operations directed by comparisons, tests, branches, loops, and subroutines embedded in subroutines. Artificial computer programs, from the Macintosh user interface to simulations of the weather to programs that ...
... logic. To understand learning, we need new ways of thinking to replace the prescientific metaphors—the mixtures and forces, the writing on slates and sculpting of blocks of marble. We need ideas that capture the ways a complex device ...
... are 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 ...
... logic of natural selection gives the answer. The ultimate goal that the mind was designed to attain is maximizing the number of copies of the genes that created it. Natural selection cares only about the longterm fate of entities that ...
... logic of the theories and separate the scientific from the moral issues. My point is not that scientists should pursue the truth in their ivory tower, undistracted by moral and political thoughts. Every human act involving another ...