Contains a ton of interesting information about human thought and what emerged as adaptations in response to the physical world and what emerged from non-adaptational causes.

Topics range from what thought is, intuition about the the theories around abstractions which the mind uses to process information (causal, linguistic, associative,...etc), emergence of culture and traditions from a third person point of view, the development of strong sensory tools like the vision, an investigation around the type of personalities and responses of people.

My main criticism is of the way it's structured.
It is ramble-y and difficult to follow at some points since it's missing a robust abstraction of ideas and topics into chapters.
Many times I've felt like I was driven down a rabbit hole and cannot recall what the chapter's ideas are about.

Written by one of the world's foremost cognitive scientists, it's an eight-chapter deep dive on the human mind and how it functions. Starts with the physiological properties of the brain and its components - how language is processed, how physical environments are understood - and slowly transitions to the more abstract notion of the mind, including human behavior and evolutionary theories about how we got to be the way we are. I'm reasonably interested in psychology and social studies and evolutionary biology, and as such, I found the second half a lot more page-turning than the first - especially since Pinker uses all kinds of unfortunately dated computer analogies early on that were surely more apt back in 1997 than they are today. (An updated version of this book might be able to milk a lot more out of "computational algorithm" metaphors, particularly given the huge advancements made in artificial intelligence and machine learning over the last two decades.) Still a fascinating read with plenty to offer, and if you ever get a chance, check out some of Pinker's lectures and debates on YouTube. The guy's pretty good at what he does!

To a large extent the answer to the books title is that we have learnt a lot but still have a long way to go! The first part of the book digs into the 'mechanics' of the brain and the mind that 'inhabits' it. Discussion of he phenomenon of concsiousness is undertaken early on and given a naturalistic solution later in the book, although it is not a very satisfying one. While I enjoyed he attempt to identify the mechanics of concsiousness, the 'answer' seemed to rely more on philosophy and a natural selection - based hypothesis about how it might work. Other chapters in the early part of the book were also concerned with mind mechanics, and the discussion of how we see and the way the mind gets involved is excellent, if mind bogglingly complex. In the latter part of the book, as refered to earlier, the flavour relies less on measured infofomation abou the brain, instead inferring what goes on through pschology studies interpreted with a natural selection lens. The arguments made are soundly reasoned and reveal uncomfortable truths for many idealist viewpoints on 'human nature' in both left and right camps. It certainly presents an alternative perspective that deeerves a more prominent place in public discussion, although it carries the risk of misinterpretation and abuse, and the message that ethics lies in a different sphere would need o be given equally clear emphasis. however, regarding the scientific underpinnings of the conclusions, these sections seemed lacking, - the argument seems to be "because of our primitive survival and reproduction needs, our emotions are tuned to follow these basic intincts". Connection with how this connects with the mind and how competing instincts are resolved was given little attention. The final chapter attemptsto explain the religious instinct and felt particularly ad hoc.
Much of what I've wrtten is critical - the book was challengin and thought provoking. It is certainly worth a read although it is reatively long and requires some perserverance. There are a few other books around which may add to some of this (i is relatively old now - 10 years or so) and certainly makes GEB more concrete and as a reslut is prbably a good place to start for modern unerstanding of the brain.

Let's be honest. I will probably never pick up this book to finish it. I began reading this because of my book club. But, I didn't think I would finish it to begin with, and due to many circumstances, the book club will not be meeting for this book. So, I have decided to put it down as one of those books I'll never finish.

I didn't like most of what I read, not due to the subject/topic, but due to the way Pinker writes. His droning on on tangents and his shoving his philosophy, which is oh so right BTW [she said dripping with sarcasm:] was too much for me. I had a hard time staying interested, which was a shame, because most sections began with promise. But Pinker would, more often than not, find a way to make the topic at hand induce heavy eyelids (or eye rolling, depending).

I wanted this book to be good and thought it would be interesting, being a Bachelor of Psychology graduate myself, but no such luck. Maybe in many years, when I have more time on my hands, or less sense, I will try picking this book up again.

This was a big brain book!

This is really a great book. I've been a fan of Steven Pinker's since the "The Blank Slate", and he does an amazing job of distilling complicated technical subjects in a way that is easily digestible and interesting to a layperson like myself. The first section of the book, which analyzes how the brain is like a computer, is a bit of a slog. In some ways it was the most interesting for me, however, since everything he dealt with was new and cutting edge. If you get through that part the rest is a real page turner. For about a month this book turned me into a Steven Pinker quote machine ("Emotions are just a doomsday device!", "Marriage is just mate-socialsm!") This, of course, makes you either highly fascinating, or the most annoying person on Earth, depending on who you talk to. Either way, I highly recommend this book. It really makes you step back and reconsider our your outdated beliefs about how people think.

Dropped at ~70%. While I overall liked the book when I was reading it on audio, I think I was a bit too forgiving of it. Switching to ebook made me realise how monotonous it is, and also how "old" it is in its arguments. When I got to the part stating women don't seek out pornography, I laughed and quietly set it down, probably to never pick it up again.

Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works is a long book and a Book about Everything. Although the title suggests it's a popular psychology book, the discoveries of psychology and especially psychology understood as evolutionary psychology are used to explain all aspects of human life. Most of the first part of the book is not technical but might be boring to its readers. For example, there's a long explanation about how vision works that was a complete snooze-fest. From about halfway on in the book, I think the readers would be interested. There, Pinker writes about how evolutionary psychology helps explain societies, and, later, our leisurely appreciation of beauty and excellence like that expressed in art or music.

Part of what the book is driving at, although it is not expressed explicitly until a later work, The Blank Slate, is that the human mind is richly endowed with these innate faculties for understanding ourselves and the world but they are, by design, limited in the ways that they allow us to interpret the information we receive from the senses. Even our faculties for scientific discovery seem to have an upper limit on them. He proposes near the end of the book philosophical questions such as "How can free will exist in a deterministic world?" might be a mystery for our species because our brains weren't designed to handle that kind of question. The characters in the book Flatland are two-dimensional shapes who live in a two-dimensional world. Any person would be free to leave the world they live in called Flatland if only they left through the third dimension. But the people in flatland are only familiar with two dimensions: forward/backward and left/right. Their minds can ask the question but they could never understand what it would mean to move in a third dimension (up/down). Because of the human mind, we're in a similar position. No reason to be pessimistic, though: The human mind is awfully rich as it is.

"http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1289334.html[return][return]I was really disappointed by this book. Pinker starts out by claiming that he will explain the origins of human emotions, aesthetics, and belief in the context of the latest findings of evolutionary and psychological research. He does not really succeed in doing so. It is a succession of moderately interesting research reports, linked together with a glue of neat one-liners (mostly other people's), but without really coming to a killer conclusion and indeed occasionally resorting to sheer polemic (eg on gender). The section on neural networks is particularly dull, especially as Pinker admits that living brains don't actually function that way. [return][return]I found precisely two points of interest in the book, both pretty tangential to the main thrust of the argument. First, of interest only to those who also know her, is that an old family friend is mentioned in passing on the development of children's minds. Second, of more general interest, is the observation that all cultures tend to design ornamental gardens with unconscious reference to the primeval African savannah - lawns and flowerbeds interrupted by carefully placed features. Rather a pleasing thought! This observation is not Pinker's own, but he does give pretty full citations for it which the interested reader can follow up.[return][return]I hear that Pinker's other books are better, so shall continue to look out for them though without particular enthusiasm."

In this book, Steven Pinker describes our mind - more precisely: our mental faculties - as a complex set of algorithms, sculpted by natural selection. Pinker uses two theories - the computational theory of mind and the theory of evolution by natural selection - to accomplish this amazing feat.

According to the computational theory of mind, our mental organs are composed of algorithms, built up out of simpler subroutines which are in turn built up out of subsubroutines. This goes all the way down to the most basic, simplest algorithms that are digital: yes/no, on/off, etc. What it means, in essence, is that we come equipped with pre-programmed mental software with which we perceive the world. This software works is based on certain assumptions - based on the stability and the continuity of physical laws - and it's in the moments that the assumptions don't hold that we are tricked or fooled by our own mind (i.e. cognitive illusions).

The other building block of Pinkers story is evolution by natural selection. Evolution shaped all the organisms on this planet, including us. Homo sapiens is unique in its mental capabilities, even though our mind is just one way to solve the natural problems (some others being strong, quick, etc.). I think the theory of evolution by natural selection has been described by excellent writers such as Dawkins, Dennett, Ridley and Zimmer (not to mention Darwin himself, even though his theory of inheritence was flawed), so I will not dwell on it here.

Now to Pinkers main thesis: to understand our mind, we have to reverse-engineer our mental organs. In other words: for every psychological trait or phenomenon we have to ask the question 'what was its adaptive function in our ancestors' environment?' It is precisely this question that cuts deep through the delusional paradigms of modern day academicians and intellectuals. The mantra is "culture determines who we are". In other words: men rape because they are raised in a culture that's hostile to women. Instead of letting ideology guide science, Pinker approaches the problem from a scientific viewpoint: first describing the facts, then using the simplest theory as possible to explain the data and after this making moral statements. Some examples:

In the chapter on Family Values, Pinker tackles the conflicts of interests between parents and offspring, husbands and wives, men and women in general and siblings. He explains these conflicts in terms of different evolutionary strategies between men and women. It pays for men to seek out sex as much as possible; it pays for women to be very selective who to mate with. This is a biological truth that even feminists and neo-marxists/blank slaters can't deny. This fundamental difference leads to competition between men for sexual access to women and to the pursuit of looking young and fertile (i.e. beautiful) between women. One of the most overlooked facts that Pinker mentions in this chapter is that a lot of the incentives for war, rape and murder are sexual motives. Maybe the men joining the army are not so crazy after all: throughout history, one of the most important rewards of victorious armies has been the genocide of men and kids and the mass rape of women. Pinkers paradigm offers new insights into our urge for agression.

But this is not all, Pinkers paradigm also offers new insights into our urge to have friends and seek out honest reputations. Evolutionary speaking, it paid to cooperate. The only problem is that this presupposes cheater-detection mechanisms, which are prone to be exploited. One of the most important parts of our social life is the earning of an honest reputation; this shows others that you are a reliable cooperator.

A third interesting aspect was the chapter on vision. Pinker analyzes the geometry of paintings and other visual art forms. One of the common threads is the presence of open landscapes with a broad horizon and some places of shelter. This was the environment our ancestors evolved in, it explains our like for these sorts of paintings and surroundings and our dislike for thick forests and deserts.

A fourth insight is the way how our ideas are formed. We come equipped with mental software to perceive the world - including the other minds in this world - and to make decisions. These algorithms are heuristic in nature. In other words: they are based on assumptions that normally held in our ancestors' environment. Sometimes we encounter situations where these assumptions don't hold and we fall prey to cognitive illusions. For example, it is commonly known that the frame in which a logical problem is placed determines the effectivity of our judgments.

A final important subject to note is the function of our emotions. Our emotions guide are actions, they are the incentives that lead us to chase pleasure and avoid pain. The objects of pleasure and pain are goals, set by evolution. We enjoy sex because organisms (i.e. our ancestors) that enjoyed sex had more sex and thereby had more offspring than organisms that didn't enjoy sex. We enjoy certain foods because our ancestors enjoyed those foods - and those that didn't had less offspring. In a sense, Hume was right when he wrote "reason is the slave of our passions." Our passions motive us to seek out the things we enjoy and avoid the things we hate.

To summarize: Pinker tries to show that by looking at our psychology as mental organs, consisting of algorithms, that were sculpted by natural selection in the past eons, we have a new paradigm to understand our mind. A paradigm based on two of the most accepted theories in science and one that excludes ideology. Only a realistic understanding of our mental constitution can lead us to appreciate what is good and what should be changed for the better. An informed ethics presupposes evolutionary psychology.

Even though I completely agree with Pinker's message and am interested in evolutionary psychology, I can't really recommend this book to laypeople. It would be better, before reading How the Mind Works, to school yourself in evolutionary biology and psychology, because Pinker's style of explaining is not for the faint hearted; he makes use of many terms that presuppose a lot of prior knowledge about the subjects involved. And a thing that annoyed me is the sheer mass of this book: 660 pages. Some chapters contained 90+ pages, which is way too long (in my opinion).

But I should not end this review on a sour note, this was a pleasant read and value the various insights I gained from this.

On a sidenote: Pinker's treatment of free will and consciousness is confusing. On the one hand, he makes valuable distinctions. So when he deals with consciousness, he makes a distinction between self knowledge, access to information and sentience and explains that the first to senses are in theory explainable by science. This is helpful. On the other hand, Pinker offers no route to answers himself and seems to retreat in a very un-academic mindset with regard to these topics. So in the example of consciousness, even though the first two aforementioned senses are explainable in scientific terms, sentience is not. Even stronger: our mind has been shaped by natural selection to deal with everyday problems and situations, offering the solution to the riddle of sentience not being one of them. In other words: the problem of consciousness is unsolvable in principle and we should not waste any more intellectual effort on this futile search. A very un-scientific mindset. (In 1542 people thought the earth was the centre of the cosmos; in 1543 Copernicus showed the earth to be just another mass of iron orbiting the sun; in the 20th century we discovered that even our sun is not so special: we live in an increasingly expanding universe in which we are just a temporary spec of dust).

The title of the book should have read "How the Mind Works (According to Steven Pinker)." The picture he paints is not wrong, per se, but vastly overestimates the power of current cognitive modeling.

There is quite a bit of good material here reviewing computational theory of mind, modularity, evolutionary psychology, and related material in cognitive science written in Pinker's usual conversational style. However, I have to hop off the bandwagon at the halfway point on this one. Sure, computational theory of mind has produced a lot of fruitful research. The mind is, to some degree, modular. The brain, like all our other organs, is shaped by evolution. My main problem is in his jump from the modularity at "low-level" cognition (e.g., basic sensory input, certain parts of language) posited by Jerry A. Fodor to "massive modularity." There are some functions that are very localized in the brain that fit with modularity, but we would expect the brain to look very different if massive modularity were true. The brain is actually very plastic with many higher-order functions that aren't strictly localized. The same thing goes for his evolutionary explanations. I will happily agree that many cognitive systems and functions are adaptive -- having eyes and a visual system is obviously beneficial! When it comes to more complex social behaviors, we're in far more speculative territory.

As an introduction to cognitive science, it does present the material in an accessible way. However, it will be difficult to for the layperson to pick apart where Pinker's description is backed by solid evidence and where it lapses into questionable claims and rank speculation. There's a bit of fluff, too, especially near the end when it begins to cross over into the more overt political rambling characteristic of The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.

Fodor's The Mind Doesn't Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology (http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Fodo...) makes for a decent corrective, though I have problems with it as well. I'm in total agreement on one point with Fodor, though: When it comes to cognitive science, we're just getting started.

This book is out of date. I chose not to waste any more time listening to it when I realized it was written in the mid 1990's.