This book started out great then dragged on. The first 200 pages pair really well with "Godel, Escher, and Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid," by Hofsteder.

A truly life-changing book. Even if you don't believe in evolution (which I'm still not sure I do) this book gives AMAZING insights into everything we do as humans, from emotions to relationships to our appreciation for art and humor... and explains how the process of evolution shaped it all. A hard read (read it with a pen and make notes in the margins), but absolutely mind-blowing.

I especially love how he illustrates heavy academic material with easily accessible examples from pop culture. While you DO need to have a, you know, 'mind that really works' to read this book, you do NOT need any kind of previous scientific training or understanding to grasp the concepts.

What parts of the brain create awareness? Are we really aware of ourselves? Why has the mind evolved to make decisions in the way it does? why do we really laugh at a joke? Why does a face look more attractive with makeup? Why does our brain drive us to enjoy sex? Why is the thought of eating worms disgusting? Why do paintings and music alleviate the hunger and thurst of mind? Why did we invent religion, music and art? How did these items adapt in the long run if it serves to nothing from an evolutionary perspective?

... ... ...

The book covers the computational theory of mind (mind is the computational product of the brain) and evolutionary psychology. There is a very little discussion about the biology of the brain but it still ponders over human natures to explain them from the biological adaptations and the by-product of evolution perspectives.

The book was published over 20 years ago but Pinker is an engaging writer. So, at least the connecting experience with a first-rate mind might not be frustrating :)

I read all bio-determinist arguments, no matter how sound their science, as a mandate to return to the 50's - those halcyon days when men schnoockered their secretaries while women bought canned foods and tended the young. Nonetheless, I loved this book. The early chapters, especially on the computational theory of mind, are incredible. Pinker is just unbelievably detailed and the linguistic spin he brings to the discussion of cognitive development is a great dimension. The later chapters are more of the men-like-variety-women-like-providers stuff that one usually hears but nuanced and entertaining nonetheless. I enjoyed this book a lot.

I had this on my list for a while and kept putting it off, but it got a nudge when I was reading a review copy of A Skeptic’s Faith: Why Scientific Materialism Cannot Be the Whole Truth and the author didn’t even make it off the first page without misrepresenting Pinker twice, in a derivative (and incorrect) single sentence summation of this book and another from The Language Instinct. I’d read the latter, but not this one. So… (he sent me down a lot of other rabbit holes with his clever word twists; but this was the longest read.) One problem with someone of Pinker’s status is that there are people who take everything he says as gospel (pardon the non secular ref), dismiss everything, and as I learned, distort what he says. And, of course, there are those of us who read everything with two bookmarks: one for where I stop, and one in the Notes section for checking, and when I jump off the check the reference. Sometimes those are tedious, and sometimes they are hard to find (if at all).

I said of The Language Instinct, “Pinker could have made his point very well in 100 pages. I admire succinct conveyance of knowledge. Pinker sure has a way of complicating concepts with extraneous details. I didn't admire this book.” Now, I do admire Pinker. And he probably could have made all his points in this book in 200, not 660, pages. Tedious at times to sift the good stuff.

Now, this book is 25 years old and a lot of progress has been made in the fields Pinker discusses. Still, he makes good points, however prolix {grin}.

Curated highlights and notes:

“There are millions of animal species on earth, each with a different set of cognitive programs. The same basic neural tissue embodies all of these programs, and it could support many others as well. Facts about the properties of neurons, neurotransmitters, and cellular development cannot tell you which of these millions of programs the human mind contains. Even if all neural activity is the expression of a uniform process at the cellular level, it is the arrangement of neurons—into bird song templates or web-spinning programs—that matters.”
{A neuron is a neuron, and the arrangement matters. Those arrangements give rise to thought and without them, thought doesn’t exist.}

“When the first face recognizers are installed in buildings to replace doormen, they will not even try to interpret the chiaroscuro of your face but will scan in the hard-edged, rigid contours of your iris or your retinal blood vessels. ”
{Facial recognition isn’t a fiction anymore.}

“The hand can be configured into a hook grip (to lift a pail), a scissors grip (to hold a cigarette), a five-jaw chuck (to lift a coaster), a three-jaw chuck (to hold a pencil), a two-jaw pad-to-pad chuck (to thread a needle), a two-jaw pad-to-side chuck (to turn a key), a squeeze grip (to hold a hammer), a disc grip (to open ajar), and a spherical grip (to hold a ball). Each grip needs a precise combination of muscle tensions that mold the hand into the right shape and keep it there as the load tries to bend it back.”
{I liked this description.}

“An intelligent system, then, cannot be stuffed with trillions of facts. It must be equipped with a smaller list of core truths and a set of rules to deduce their implications. But the rules of common sense, like the categories of common sense, are frustratingly hard to set down. ”
And if they are set down, they can’t be immutable.}

“Why give a robot an order to obey orders—why aren’t the original orders enough? Why command a robot not to do harm—wouldn’t it be easier never to command it to do harm in the first place?”
{This is silly. New orders are different than preprogrammed orders. As to the second, somebody wishing harm may not have the restraint to not command such.}

“The computer running WordPerfect on your desk will continue to fill paragraphs for as long as it does anything at all. Its software will not insidiously mutate into depravity like the picture of Dorian Gray.”
{But Bing chat did.}

“The far-reaching effects of the genes have been documented in scores of studies and show up no matter how one tests for them: by comparing twins reared apart and reared together, by comparing identical and fraternal twins, or by comparing adopted and biological children. And despite what critics sometimes claim, the effects are not products of coincidence, fraud, or subtle similarities in the family environments (such as adoption agencies striving to place identical twins in homes that both encourage walking into the ocean backwards).”
{Uh oh. Genes driving actions and behaviors? Oh, the outcry from the religious, anti-determinists, and libertarians alike.}


“Cognitive science helps us to understand how a mind is possible and what kind of mind we have. Evolutionary biology helps us to understand why we have the kind of mind we have.”

“... the mind is not the brain but what the brain does, and not even everything it does, such as metabolizing fat and giving off heat.”
{Dualists have a hard time with the mind not being something separate instead of "what the brain does"}

“The computational theory of mind resolves the paradox. It says that beliefs and desires are information, incarnated as configurations of symbols. The symbols are the physical states of bits of matter, like chips in a computer or neurons in the brain. ”
{This is it. This will vex the philosophers, theo-folk, and anyone not understanding that the brain makes the mind.}

“Many of us have been puzzled by the takeover of humanities departments by the doctrines of postmodernism, poststructuralism, and deconstructionism, according to which objectivity is impossible, meaning is self-contradictory, and reality is socially constructed. ”

“Since the modern mind is adapted to the Stone Age, not the computer age, there is no need to strain for adaptive explanations for everything we do. Our ancestral environment lacked the institutions that now entice us to nonadaptive choices, such as religious orders, adoption agencies, and pharmaceutical companies, so until very recently there was never a selection pressure to resist the enticements”
{Spot on. We are not far enough removed from those Stone Age roots for them to be evolutionary decimal dust.}

“Contrary to popular belief, the gene-centered theory of evolution does not imply that the point of all human striving is to spread our genes. With the exception of the fertility doctor who artificially inseminated patients with his own semen, the donors to the sperm bank for Nobel Prize winners, and other kooks, no human being (or animal) strives to spread his or her genes. Dawkins explained the theory in a book called The Selfish Gene, and the metaphor was chosen carefully. People don’t selfishly spread their genes; genes selfishly spread themselves. They do it by the way they build our brains. ”
{Cue the old Jewish trope: ah-haaa!}

“[...] the mass of information processing in the nervous system falls into two pools. One pool, which includes the products of vision and the contents of short-term memory, can be accessed by the systems underlying verbal reports, rational thought, and deliberate decision making. The other pool, which includes autonomic (gut-level) responses, the internal calculations behind vision, language, and movement, and repressed desires or memories (if there are any), cannot be accessed by those systems. Sometimes information can pass from the first pool to the second or vice versa. When we first learn how to use a stick shift, every motion has to be thought out, but with practice the skill becomes automatic. With intense concentration and biofeedback, we can focus on a hidden sensation like our heartbeat.”

“The two deepest questions about the mind are “What makes intelligence possible?” and “What makes consciousness possible?” With the advent of cognitive science, intelligence has become intelligible.”
{Leaving, still, the question of what makes consciousness possible.}

“The chasm between what can be measured by a physicist and what can cause behavior is the reason we must credit people with beliefs and desires.
In our daily lives we all predict and explain other people's behavior from what we think they know and what we think they want. Beliefs and desires are the explanatory tools of our own intuitive psychology, and intuitive psychology is the most useful and complete science of behavior there is.”
{Complete? Uh, okay. Don't forget that it is still just a guess.}

“The traditional explanation of intelligence is that human flesh is suffused with a non-material entity, the soul, usually envisioned as some kind of ghost or spirit. But the theory faces an insurmountable problem: How does the spook interact with solid matter? ”
{This.}

“Of course, something about the tissue in the human brain is necessary for our intelligence, but the physical properties are not sufficient, just as the physical properties of bricks are not sufficient to explain architecture and the physical properties of oxide particles are not sufficient to explain music. Something in the patterning of neural tissue is crucial.”
{And this.}

“No, intelligence does not come from a special kind of spirit or matter or energy but from a different commodity, information. ”
{AND....this!}

“These are called the “causal” and the “inferential-role” theories, and philosophers hostile to each have had fun thinking up preposterous thought experiments to refute them. ”
{Pastime of philosophers is thinking if questions that can't be answered, then answering them (ostensibly)> And, it seems, knocking about with other philosophers.}

“We don’t need spirits or occult forces to explain intelligence. Nor, in an effort to look scientific, do we have to ignore the evidence of our own eyes and claim that human beings are bundles of conditioned associations, puppets of the genes, or followers of brutish instincts. We can have both the agility and discernment of human thought and a mechanistic framework in which to explain it. ”
{Yes.}

“If we could ever duplicate the information processing in the human mind as an enormous computer program, would a computer running the program be conscious?”

“One of the reasons God was invented was to be the mind that formed and executed life’s plans.”

“Mencken when he wrote, “Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.”

“For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. ”
{This goes in the quote pile.}

“Maybe philosophical problems are hard not because they are divine or irreducible or meaningless or workaday science, but because the mind of Homo sapiens lacks the cognitive equipment to solve them. ”

“And perhaps we cannot solve conundrums like free will and sentience.”

“It is easy to draw extravagant and unwarranted conclusions from the suggestion that our minds lack the equipment to solve the major problems of philosophy. It does not say that there is some paradox of self-reference or infinite regress in a mind’s trying to understand itself. Psychologists and neuroscientists don’t study their own minds; they study someone else’s. Nor does it imply some principled limitation on the possibility of knowledge by any knower, like the Uncertainty Principle or Gödel’s theorem. It is an observation about one organ of one species, equivalent to observing that cats are color-blind or that monkeys cannot learn long division. It does not justify religious or mystical beliefs but explains why they are futile.”
{I need to give Pinker more of his due.}

“The computational aspect of consciousness (what information is available to which processes), the neurological aspect (what in the brain correlates with consciousness), and the evolutionary aspect (when and why did the neurocomputational aspects emerge) are perfectly tractable, and I see no reason that we should not have decades of progress and eventually a complete understanding—even if we never solve residual brain-teasers like whether your red is the same as my red or what it is like to be a bat.”

“First, if the mind is a system of organs designed by natural selection, why should we ever have expected it to comprehend all mysteries, to grasp all truths? We should be thankful that the problems of science are close enough in structure to the problems of our foraging ancestors that we have made the progress that we have. ”
{And there again are the primitive roots we aren't so evolutionarily far from.}

I started reading this and like a number of others on here, part way through just found the effort was not being sufficiently rewarded. One of the very few books I have been happy to give up on.

Very interesting. 20-30 years from now, I think most people will understand that there's nothing "magical" about the "mind", the "soul", religion, art, men, women, or any of the other sacred cows that continue to hold back humans from understanding themselves.

How the Mind Works was published back in 1997, but I didn't encounter any of the points that Pinker made in High School or Collage, up until 2000. Pinker focuses on a "computational theory of mind", saying that the mind is a complex parallel information processing system.

Of course Pinker doesn't have the "final word" on How the Mind Works, but he provides more evidence, more insight, and more rationality than the "romantics" and their leaders Freud Sigmund 1856-1939 Sigmund and Carl Jung.

Pinker continues on many of the themes here in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.

Unfortunately for Americans, Political Correctness seems to be a barrier to accurately seeing human nature, as human nature necessarily is different for different groups of people, particularly for men and women.

My favorite anecdote is about the "Coolidge effect":

… an old joke about Calvin Coolidge when he was President … The President and Mrs. Coolidge were being shown [separately] around an experimental government farm. When [Mrs. Coolidge] came to the chicken yard she noticed that a rooster was mating very frequently. She asked the attendant how often that happened and was told, “Dozens of times each day.” Mrs. Coolidge said, “Tell that to the President when he comes by.” Upon being told, President asked, “Same hen every time?” The reply was, “Oh, no, Mr. President, a different hen every time.” President: “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.”

Pinker explains the mind by "reverse-engineering" it—figuring out what natural selection designed it to accomplish in the environment in which we evolved. The mind, he writes, is a system of "organs of computation" that allowed our ancestors to understand and outsmart objects, animals, plants, and each other.

How the Mind Works explains many of the imponderables of everyday life. Why does a face look more attractive with makeup? How do "Magic-Eye" 3-D stereograms work? Why do we feel that a run of heads makes the coin more likely to land tails? Why is the thought of eating worms disgusting? Why do men challenge each other to duels and murder their ex-wives? Why are children bratty? Why do fools fall in love? Why are we soothed by paintings and music? And why do puzzles like the self, free will, and consciousness leave us dizzy?

This arguments in the book are as bold as its title. Pinker rehabilitates unfashionable ideas, such as that the mind is a computer and that human nature was shaped by natural selection. And he challenges fashionable ones, such as that passionate emotions are irrational, that parents socialize their children, that creativity springs from the unconscious, that nature is good and modern society corrupting, and that art and religion are expressions of our higher spiritual yearnings.

I loved this book and yet (as with most overlong tomes) I couldn't wait for it to end.

The love outweighed all else though. This was due in part to this one book having more width and depth than all the psychology courses I took at university put together. I almost wish that I had skipped Uni and read this instead, but then again I doubt I would have understood this book without the basic grounding their courses kindly provided.

A rare mixture of luminous thinking and clear writing is how I would summarise this book.

I'm not really feeling in a mood to be verbose about psychology and philosophy today so you're going to have to be content with this.

If you want more then scan through my 'reading progress' notes - they give more detail.

And I still don't know how the mind works, since I had to give up at page 68. Unfortunately, Pinker apparently had no clue how the mind works, either. After 68 pages, not a single point was made. Oh, there was a lot about how the mind DOESN'T work, but nothing on how it does.

Or, if there was, it just slipped by me. Pinker might be a vibrant television personality, but his writing is just the opposite.

Pinker seemed to be really struggling in these opening 68 pages. He took on far too large of a task. He wound up rambling about robots, computers, this, that, and the other thing, but not how the mind works. He was clear that the mind was separate from the brain. That I did get.

If you do want to give this a go, and best of luck to you if you do, the 1998 edition is currently up on The Open Library. It's best to search for Steven Pinker, then go through the list to find this book. If you search for the title, only the deleted editions show up.

I found the chapter titled "The Mind's Eye" to be so tedious and seemingly interminable (80+ pages) that I nearly quit this book. But I slogged through and was rewarded ultimately with a fascinating read. Pinker's controversial thesis--that the mind is a computational organ, engineered by natural selection ("a naturally selected neural computer"), is well described and well defended, in prose that is, for the most part, readable and accessible, much of chapter 4 notwithstanding. But for readers who only want to tackle one thick book by this author, I would recommend his The Blank Slate instead.

This book explains how the human brain feels and thinks from an evolutionary biology stand point. How we see, smell, hear, perceive, abstract and memorize has all been shaped by tangible survival needs of our ancestors. However, the surprising and interesting part of the book is about how our emotions and social skills were also a product of evolution. Even romantic love!! :)

However, there was a point ~60,000 years ago when evolution (a very slow process that works over millions of years) became secondary in shaping the human mind who started to discover itself and the world around it. We were the first species to have such advanced mental faculties that moved on from solving survival problems to ask fundamental questions about the meaning of the world itself. The problem is our brain is not biologically built to answer these questions and therefore we probably need a different mind or type of mind (an AI maybe?) to attempt such answers.

According to Dr. Pinker, the mind's functioning can be explained by the computational theory of mind, that is, the theory that the human mind is the product of complex neuronal activity shaped over thousands of generations through natural selection. This theory posits that the mind is comprised of specific problem solving modules each designed to tackle problems of survival. The book could have been titled the evolutionary theory of mind since much of it is focused on natural selection and the propagation of genes as an explanation for how human mental modules came to exist. It is an entertaining attempt to explain many facets of human behavior, but I think the book could have been half as long. Of particular interest is the final chapter in which he attempts to shed light on the arts, music, humor, religion, and philosophy. These areas of life he argues have little adaptive or survival value and he attempts to use the theory to understand why human beings hold these things in such high esteem. Finally, he presents the idea that perhaps the human brain did not evolve the capacity to solve the deepest mysteries of human existence.