How The Mind Works

The Pulitzer Prize finalist and national bestseller How the Mind Worksis a fascinating, provocative work exploring the mysteries of human thought and behavior. How do we see in three dimensions? How do we remember names and faces? How is it, indeed, that we ponder the nature of our own consciousness? Why do we fall in love? In this bold, extraordinary book, Pinker synthesizes the best of cognitive science and evolutionary biology to explain what the mind is, how it has evolved, and, ultimately, how it works. This edition includes a new afterword that explores the impact of the book and its relevance today.

Big, brash, and a lot of fun.

Witty popular science that you enjoy reading for the writing as well as for the science.

In this extraordinary bestseller, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading cognitive scientists, does for the rest of the mind what he did for language in his 1994 book, The Language Instinct. He explains what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life. And he does it with the wit that prompted Mark Ridley to write in the New York Times Book Review, "No other science writer makes me laugh so much. . . . [Pinker] deserves the superlatives that are lavished on him."

"[How the Mind Works] marks out the territory on which the coming century's debate about human nature will be held."--Oliver Morton, The New Yorker

Includes bibliographical references (p. 589-625) and index.

Steven Pinkeris professor of psychology and director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.