“A model of scientific writing: erudite, witty, and clear.” —New York Review of BooksIn 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 … 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.
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Well-written and easily understood by the lay man, the book opens the door to modern neurological finding in an interesting way. Whether you have a particular interest in the mind-brain question or just enjoy increasing your understanding of science, this book is for you.
Pinker has a rare talent for putting complex scientific concepts into language we can all understand.
Clearly not as good as Thinking Fast or Slow or the others. Hard to read, because of the prose. I’m a PhD physicist, and as pointed out it was hard to read. The language, dealing with the logic, was overly complicated causing worries of fallacious thinking. The references were rarely there. As pointed out there are much better books (e.g, …
Fascinating exploration of the human mind. As always, Pinker is outstanding
Fascinating and informative but you can’t read it in large doses.
Lots of medical information and explanations of why we are like we are.
A very thorough explanation of the evolutionary-computational theory of mind, which seems to be the reigning favorite among cognitive scientists. Pinker writes exceedingly well but the subject matter is difficult at times. Highly recommended for any serious student of science’s attempt to understand the mind.
Boring, not written for the average reader.
For me this wasn’t a fun read, but I wanted to understand how so many of my friends and relatives voted for and support President Trump. This book tries to explain how we think differently on controversial ideas. As in so many of this type of book, I found there was too much repetition.
The most important book I’ve ever read, and I don’t say that lightly.
So many people have written tomes on how the pyramids were built. This book took into consideration not just the engineering answers but the more social questions such as what do we do if the pharaoh dies young? It answers other odd questions such as what is that long skinny passage for anyway?
Pinker is an excellent writer and a great salesman for evolutionary psychology. He makes some excellent points about bias in the criticisms of social scientists, but he does oversell his point of view. You can learn a lot from reading this book while being entertained, but be careful and reserve judgement. Pinker is a little too in love with his …
Truly fascinating
Although much was over my head, I learned a lot of new concepts and plan to read it again.
I was excited to read this book as I have a deep interest in neuropsychology and I found his approach with robot design fascinating and intriguing. It was an effective way to show the complexity of the brain’s function. However, it was not far into the book when some of the tired, outdated, disproven concepts from Darwin were brought out as fact …