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.

Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker claims in the afterword of this being his favorite book of which he is the most proud. As the title indicates, it is about the mind, and the first chapter summarizes the book’s core idea in a single sentence: “The mind is a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their foraging way of life, in particular, understanding and outmaneuvering objects, animals, plants, and other people.” One fallacy that Professor Pinker seeks to debunk is that humans constitute some higher order of evolution. Rather, current iterations of body and mind exist today simply because they previously conferred survival and success to our ancestors based on time and circumstance. More generally, the book covers cognition, pattern recognition and thought processes, visual perception, emotions, relationships (from an evolution / selfish gene perspective), and the purpose (or lack thereof) of art, philosophy, and other “deeper” concepts which on their face do not convey patently recognizable survival advantages. For many (including in STEM) the mind is often taken for granted without appreciating its complexities and elegance. Even by today’s (2024) standards and with AGI on the supposed horizon, the mind remains unparalleled as the pinnacle of engineering whether by deity or natural selection.

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.

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.

Long long book. Overburdened with information,but gives very little to the mind. It is a book about how our minds work. I was wondering while reading, does it really get to the point what it tries to explain? And i found very short amount of words motivated towards its motivation. After keeping me drawn to every opening chapters it deviates from its promise and becomes dull. There are so many things to skip which is because of Pinker's inability to understand what should be included in this book. Besides, so many things were incomprehensible(it was not my inability to comprehend) because Pinker wasn’t interested going with the context. What can i say more about a book where the writer blabbers for most of the part! And wouldn’t it be an irony if i try to blabber about a book because of its blabbering?
I would just recommend this book to no one. If anybody wants to read regarding this subject matter of mind there are so many great books except this. So if you don't value your time(which i don't as well),read it anyhow.

How the mind works is a very interesting and eye opening book, What I liked about the book was that it talks about our biology, what is inside of us like our genes from our past ancestors and how that affects many generations in the lifestyle and decisions that they make. It also throws out there crazy concepts or that at least seem unordinary in our society such as raping individuals in our genes. What I also liked about the book was that it presented factual evidence on most of the topics discussed in the book. I also liked that it talked about evolution because that is one of my favorite topics to discuss and learn more information about because it astounds me how we can come from the forms that we come from and how we adapted to our environment and what we were exposed to. The thing that I didn't like about the book was that it came out bias in some aspect of the book just off the wording they were using, it seemed one sided at times and I like more when its holistic and you look at all the different aspects and keep your opinions to yourself that others may be sensitive to in a way. I learned a lot from the book such as the mind is so complex it holds within it what your ancestors may have embedded in your brain and what knowledge and information you have obtained through the years. Learn to understand the scientific side of life. Yes I would recommend this book to others because it gave me an array of information in just this 500 page book that I might have never learned in school because our system is censored at time and they don't like to discuss a lot of different challenging topics.

I didn't like it. I have read two books by Steven Pinker so far (Enlightenment Now and The Better Angels of Our Nature) and had to struggle through both. I dislike the way Steven Pinker presents his arguments, I despise his arrogance and the way he dismisses different theories, I hate his chatty approach to popular science.

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.

Like GEB, this book attempts to cover a lot of ground, and in most places does a great job of putting new thoughts and perspectives in our heads

Steven Pinker is a world famous liberal evolutionary psychologist. As most intellectually focused psychologists I try to read everything he writes. It's the basic psychology science presented in a simple but intellectual way.

Pro:

This is a huge book. It really goes into a lot of psychology topics and most of them are well illustrated. It's one of those books that is a bit hard to get into and read, but you want to read it again because there are so many good nuggets here. I feel like I may have missed a few great points.

Con:

If you have read a few evolutionary psychology books this will feel very familiar in many chapters. I was zoning out quite often as I he kept presenting topics I already had read about like mating, men, women and basic psychology. This also means that it's a great intro book into psychology. I will for sure recommend it to people getting into the field.

Another thing is that it's a bit old. He is often talking about blank slate thinking and how it's bunk science, but old psychology is often more blank slate than current psychology. Since the 90's we have had a lot of gene and heritability studies that showed that most of the factors we thought were mostly environment are actually mostly genetic. Politics, personality, parenting, intelligence. We have had a lot of great studies on the heritability of these traits and they really ought to be included in such a book. It does feel a bit environment focused and it's predictable for a book this old. But it's not the end of the road for psychology knowledge anyhow and you ought to continue reading up on it. For anyone reading up on modern psychology this is it, but presented from a slight liberal view point which probably makes it a great intro book for people who are left of center and have a hard time getting into the hard science.

It's a typical Pinker book. If you like his writing it's a must read for you.

Ho impiegato tre mesi per finirlo, lettura molto pesante. Già il libro è corposo come lunghezza (circa 600 pagine), ma il problema è stata la qualità di scrittura. Non coinvolgente, a tratti "stancante" e ripetitiva. Ho impiegato molto a leggerlo perché ogni 100 pagine mi interrompevo e leggevo un altro libro per "distrarmi". Alla fine, comunque, non ho capito come funziona la mente quindi il titolo è fuorviante. Credevo fosse un libro con basi scientifiche invece è solo narrativo.
Do 2 stelle e non 1 perché, verso la fine, ci sono state alcune pagine (non più di 50) interessanti circa la famiglia.

4.5/5. The minus half star is for the amount of Woody Allan references. Fuck that guy.

That aside tho, great summary of my cognitive science degree so far. Could've saved me a couple classes tbh.
Aside from the strictly biological facts / cognitive theories: had some interesting asides about how we can or should combine (or sometimes detach) science from morality and ethics. Don't know where I stand in all of those points yet but good to think about.