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.

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.

2.5/5, много полезна информация, събрана на едно място. Шапки долу за труда да се събере и синтезира.
Но... много куц писател :) не умее да разказва, но му пиша шест за умението да проучва и синтезира.

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.

This book was an amazing read!
I cannot get around the fact that it was written by one person, let alone one person with a lot of other books on the same topic, and yet more provocative each time.

I loved the detailed and comprehensive outlook on each subject matter.

It is not a textbook, It is a long essay that gives you a rational, up-to-date, coherent, general yet accurate, A frame for thinking about mind, cognition, and emotions, and also changes our day-to-day worldview about people in general."

The only complaint I have is that this book could have used more hierarchical structure.

First, the mind is not the brain, but the brain’s actions. Pinker put forward two theories on the origin and evolution of the mind, the computational theory of mind, and the theory of natural selection. The core of the computational theory of mind is that the human mind works in the same way as a computer. It interprets external information the brain receives using different representations, then processes it and finally produces an output. Our mind has at least four major forms of representation, namely visual representation, phonological representation, grammatical representation, and mentalese. The key idea of natural selection theory is that the human mind is the result of genetic evolution. Four critical factors contribute to the evolution of the human mind, which are vision, group living, hands, and hunting.

Second, the four abilities of the mind are vision perception, inference, emotions, and social relations. Through visual perception, we can transform what we see into mental descriptions. Inference is the basis of our understanding and interpretation of the world. Based on classification, inference enables us to analyze information with the help of three tools, logic, arithmetic and probability. Additionally, emotions enable us to seek benefits, to avoid harm, and to ensure gene replication. Finally, due to the existence of social relations, we can demonstrate altruistic behaviors at appropriate times.

When Pinker finally wrote in the book that we don’t live by bread alone, he means that we also have music, art, poetry, and drama. These are not the products of adaptation, but the masterpieces of our minds, and what make our life meaningful. It is nature’s unique design that allows us to compromise on one thing, and excel at another when facing challenges. This demonstrates the greatness of nature, and all of us should show our respect and appreciation for it.

I know the book has definite shortcomings. For one, it is mostly second and third hand information, that is, he relates different experiments and different theories that he agrees with and tries less (thought he does try) to bring diverging viewpoints into the discussion. Secondly, the book is indebted to Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene from which he draws most of his conclusions in evolutionary genetics and the relevant experiments which make up half of the book (the second half). And finally, the book betrays its age, as current advances in computer pattern recognition are way beyond the limits of what he envisaged back in 1997.

However, the book is based on something else which is, I think, Pinker's most important contribution. This is the computational theory of mind, which he painstakingly tries to explain, along with the concepts associated with computation. Less generally accepted, but very stimulating for me, were the discussions on evolutionary psychology and (to a lesser extent) evolutionary development. The data to support these claims are less than concrete and draw different conclusions in different theoretical frameworks, but to me the conclusions are satisfying answers (so you can say that this is mysticism I can relate to) and hold the promise of future discoveries which can either confirm them or make changes to them.

Harika bir kitap. Pinker müthiş bir yazar..

This morning while swimming I thought of this book. And I thought also of a conversation I had recently with a friend. We were talking about human consciousness.

Swimming is a perfect thing to do when thinking about consciousness. While sliding along the water we are deprived of many things, in particular of the full powers of our senses. There is very little to hear; smellandtaste are also kept at bay; what we can look at is reduced to a wall and a straight line on the floor of the pool; and the pleasant and refreshing water assuages our touch. So, even if we stop being ourselves since we are not in our natural medium, we can however only be ourselves.

Consciousness runs galore.

I actually read this book a while ago, and I did so also some time after I interrupted my studies in neurobiology. I had to stop because of personal reasons. But I remember two things clearly about this book.

The first is that It was an excellent summary of what was known about the brain when the book was published, and which I had been studying in more detailed textbooks. Alas, I have not kept with further advances, but my guess is that it is still a very relevant read today.

The study is very well structured as a survey of the various considerations on how the mind works, and it is written in a very engaging style. It is also engaging because it addresses our immediate and commonsensical concerns about how our mind works. Why we forget, how do we recognize faces, what falling in love may entail, what it is to laugh.. etc.

The best part was the chapter on vision, may be because to me that is one of the most magical powers of our brain. How it can process what our light detecting organs perceive, and create vision in its rear part is a phenomenon that defies our senses.

Pinker does not deal with language in this book because he devoted another book, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Languagewhich I have not read yet. He designed them to complement each other.

The second thing I remember is the conclusion.

After examining scientifically the various abilities of the brain, Pinker finally gets to the idea of Consciousness, the most perplexing aspect of the brain. But then he gives up and admits that our human capacities are unable to understand how consciousness has come to be, nor what it is. He proposes that probably only an entity with higher abilities than those of our brain would be able to look down upon human Consciousness and understand what it is (does he mean a god, or a machine, or martians?).

Of course, so far he is completely right. No one has, as yet, been able to explain Consciousness satisfactorily, and it has been approached from a myriad of fields. Is Consciousness created or has it evolved?. Is it only in our bodies, and therefore mortal, or can it transmigrate?. What is it anyway?

So, the missing star is not because of what Pinker has written in this book but for its title. He does not really explain, fully, what he promises: how our mind works.


In any case, I am going swimming tomorrow again, and my Consciousness is delighted with the idea, even if it does not know what it-self is.

This book is way too long, and the last part (about philosophy) is fairly ill-informed. The most surprising thing is that cognitive psychology is limited to perception and the imagery debate; no discussion of memory, very limited discussion of reasoning, not to mention planning or motor planning. For today's standards, it's outdated by David Buss's text on evolutionary psychology.

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.

This book is a little harder to comprehend than other Pinker books... I will not recommend it as a neuroscience primer. Incognito by David Eagleman is so much better.