Note that this book was written in the nineties before reading the book or this review.

This book raised more questions than answers for me but that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Pinker covers a wide range of topics from biological, anthropological to social constructs that have shaped our human mind and behavior. I found the chapter about the place of humor in evolution fascinating (maybe cause I have never read about it before). This book also clarified the notion of Richard Dawkin's 'selfish gene' in a broader context than just biological/evolutionary i.e. it is not animals that are selfish due to their selfish genes rather that their brains and behaviors are designed by the influence of the selfish genes. At times they will, in fact, make sacrifices which might seem altruistic from a societal perspective.

Overall this huge book was quite difficult to digest and should be paced to read and ponder upon. It won't answer your questions but will provide a good framework to explore the questions whose answers you seek.

The reason I knocked off a star was because I felt like it ended a bit abruptly when it was time to discuss human consciousness. It is a tall order to expect the author to provide answers but I wish he spent more time talking about it.

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.

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.

I really enjoyed the chapter in computational theory of mind and the discussions of intelligence and mental representations. Other chapters, not so much; low-level vision science is woefully boring (that’s a personal preference though) and using evolutionary theory still remains a “grand theory of everything” that can be used as a post-hoc explanation of some but not all interpersonal phenomena.

This is a truly comprehensive treatment of the human mind. Pinker delves deeply into the reasons why the mind has evolved to make decisions in the way it does. There is very little discussion about the biology of the brain; the book points out that a good understanding of the origins of human behavior requires descriptions at a higher level--at the level of the mind, and how it evolved through natural selection. Pinker shows how natural selection has worked its way into every nook and cranny of the mind ... absolutely fascinating. Every chapter goes into great detail about how our belief system developed, our vision, our reasoning abilities, our family structures, and our emotions. Pinker describes how our minds are similar to computers and neural networks, and how they are different. I've read other books by Pinker, and they are all great. Highly recommended to every human with a mind!

Any deficiency in rating are my own.

Highly entertaining, sometimes difficult to follow and understand, always fascinating.

Zihnin ne olduğu ve nasıl çalıştığına dair 22 sene önce yazılmış başucu kitabı. Zengin içeriğine rağmen daha güncel, çevirisi daha iyi, daha kolay okunabilen kitaplar bulunabilir.

Bu kitabı ilginç kılan zihnin, basit evrimsel süreçlerle var olabileceğini ortaya koyması. Hem de bütün karmaşıklığına, gizemine, eşsizliğine rağmen.

Zihnin özellikleri, evrimsel psikoloji çerçevesinde, tersine mühendislikle masaya yatırılıyor. Bu özelliklerin nasıl bir adaptasyon olduğu ve doğal seleksiyonun eleğinde kalmayı nasıl mümkün kıldığı tartışılıyor. 

Tartışma bazen insan doğasının karanlık dehlizlerine, çıkmaz sokaklarına giriyor: Irkçılık, akraba kayırma, özdenetim eksikliği (iradesizlik), cinayet, evlat katli, erkek sadakatsizliği, kadının servet avcılığı...

Bu gerçekler toplumun geniş kesminin itirazına neden olmuş. "Yaratılmışların en şereflisi" olmama gerçeği ile yüzleşemeyen dindarlar ve "kültürel etki"nin sadık savunucusu entellektüeller birlikte saldırmışlar. Öyle ki yazar fikirlerini savunmak adına "Boş Sayfa - İnsan doğasının modern inkârı" isimli başka bir kitap yazmak durumunda kalmış.

Book Review
Period 2
Melissa Hurtado
A Level Psych




They say the mind is a beautiful paradox because it uses itself to understand itself. This quote has chased me around my high school years like a leopard hounding after its prey. Ever since my youth, I have noticed my skepticism on the human capsule. I often wondered if rigorous science labs brought up such an idea as the human mind. Although, childhood beliefs kept my thoughts grounded to an absolute that a grater power was the innovator. How The Mind Works was food for my thoughts. Steven pinker did not answer all of my unending questions but did satisfy some of my mysteries. He starts off by stating about the importance of the cognitive niche. He also states how vision is one of the many factors that have allowed our minds to go to such far extents. I do agree with him in this. Vision has allowed us to make buildings as high as mountains, paintings that capture feelings, and better yet help us find a mate. In the book he explains illusions and different visionary test to see how our mind correlates to our brain and mind. The human mind has been a topic of discussion for over many centuries and I believe Steven Pinker simplified the structure of it in a way that's both enjoyable and informative. Although Pinker had such a great way of easing us into the wonders of the mind, he worked too much on certain topics such as individuality. He did not believe that culture, race, etc.... plays a part in our molding decisions throughout our lives. Those who wonder off into the next levels of the mind's philosophy should read this book. I highly recommend to any who is skeptical about how everything comes together. In the way that this book has helped many readers, it has also helped me add to my knowledge of the mind and the little details that come together to make it up.

I have finished this book ever more certain that freewill is an illusion. The bigger the Asshole the narrower his options on moral choices. We are getting it wrong in our society on so many important areas. e treat people as if they are responsible for their bad choices when essentially they aren't. There is a lot more to this book and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

I learned so much from this book. Some of the information makes for interesting conversation, like, why we think people are beautiful, how our eyes set us apart from all other animals, and why men have a roving eye for other females. Steven Pinker utilizes the expertise of the world's best scientists in their fields to explain How the Mind Works.

This is a very readable and influential synthesis of the cognitive science view of the mind with that of evolutionary psychology. The overall thrust is that the mind is a neural computer closely governed by feelings and desires that were shaped by natural selection for their adaptive value in the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of our ancestors. The book is lively, with lots of down to earth examples. He holds your hand when wading through many technical subjects, faces disputes in a non-dogmatic way, and addresses political spins on scientific matters in a forthright way.

The heft and scope of the volume is daunting. Yet it is written to be accessible to the general reader as well as scholars. As the emphasis is on synthesis and not a unifying novel theory of mind dependent on the cohesion of all its parts, I feel that the average reader could benefit from reading only the chapters of interest to them. There are sections on visual perception, neural network modeling, passionate emotions, social behaviors, and cultural innovations. As with Wilson’s “Sociobiology”, many readers will be interested in what he has to say about biological roots of human violence, sexual behavior, family values, and the arts. This includes accounts of adaptive values for lying, self delusion, war, mass murder, rape, pornography, parent-child and sibling conflict, altruism, love, marriage, and friendship. Particularly fascinating is his coverage of the cross-cultural phenomenon of people going “amok” and tie-in with the “doomsday machine” theory of passionate emotions, the adaptive value of which lies in their service as “guarantors of threats and promises”.

He makes a good argument that thinking conforms to a kind of language, or mentalese, with categorical, syntactical, and generative properties aligned with Chomsky’s conceptions. He places a big emphasis on the role of beliefs and desires in his perspective on the core properties of human intellect. He doesn’t hold out much hope in the explanatory potential of neuroscience, considering models at that level an inadequate reductionism: "Even if neuroscientists someday decode the entire wiring diagram of the brain, human behavior makes the most sense when it was explained in terms of beliefs and desires, not in terms of volts and grams. Physics provides no insight into the machinations of a crafty lawyer, and even fails to enlighten us about many simpler acts of living things." I agree that explanations at the level physics will not help understand the mind, but I feel hopeful that neuroscience can make much progress in merging biological and psychological models. As this book was written in 2007, it misses the neurological synthesis of the computational and emotional aspects of the mind achieved by Damasio in his 2009 book and the decade of great ferment in cognitive neuroscience due to studies using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

No matter how much it looks like he is on the pathway to biological determinism for so many “bad” human behaviors, he takes great pains to dissociate our inherited mental equipment from our systems of moral responsibility and vision of equal rights: "To understand is not to forgive". For example, understanding a human tendency to revile other cultures does not excuse the Holocaust. Biological determinism for even liberal values can be misguided, e.g. “The argument against persecuting gay people must be made not in terms of the gay gene or the gay brain but in terms of people’s right to engage in private consensual acts without discrimination or harassment.” In the case of the male tendency to mate with any women they can, even to the point of rape, rather than agreeing with one of his students that the key conclusion is that “Men are slime!”, he feels they still should be swayed by morality: “If … men are especially tempted to commit certain crimes against women, the implication is that deterrents should be surer and more severe, not that the crimes are somehow less odious.” Pinker further argues that environmental determinism is just as unfruitful. He feels feminists’ stance against discrimination and oppression of women can do without the position that their origin lies in brainwashing of children and youth by media, pornography, and child rearing and educational practices.

A refreshing aspect of Pinker’s book is that he makes very little claim to explaining free will and sentience. He also places a lot of advanced cultural accomplishments of humans, such as art, humor, and religion in a category of having no likely evolutionary adaptive value. He suspects that these capacities are “along for the ride” and that “human brains evolved by one set of laws, those of natural selection and genetics, and now interact with one another according to another set of laws, those of cognitive and social psychology, human ecology, and history”.

"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."