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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... things, even if they do not determine exactly which things they do. My point is not that prodding brain tissue is irrelevant to understanding the mind, only that it is not enough. Psychology, the analysis of mental software, will have ...
... things, large negative deviations as black things. If the illumination really is smooth and uniform, those perceptions will register the surfaces of the world accurately. Since Planet Earth has, more or less, met the even-illumination ...
... things they do with the information available to them, not necessarily by the kinds of information they have available. So the metaphor of the mental module is a bit clumsy; a better one is Noam Chomsky's “mental organ.” An organ of the ...
... things a design for?” the theory of natural selection provides the answer: the long-term stable replicators, genes. Even our bodies, our selves, are not the ultimate beneficiary of our design. As Gould has said, “What is the 'individual ...
... things that are alleged to oppress them.) A denial of human nature, no less than an emphasis on it, can be warped to serve harmful ends. We should expose whatever ends are harmful and whatever ideas are false, and not confuse the two. 5.