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How the Mind Works

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How the Mind Works

Written by: Steven Pinker
Narrated by: Mel Foster
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In this delightful, acclaimed best seller, one of the world’s leading cognitive scientists tackles the workings of the human mind. What makes us rational—and why are we so often irrational? How do we see in three dimensions? What makes us happy, afraid, angry, disgusted, or sexually aroused? Why do we fall in love? And how do we grapple with the imponderables of morality, religion, and consciousness?

How the Mind Works synthesizes the most satisfying explanations of our mental life from cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and other fields to explain what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and contemplate the mysteries of life. This new edition of Pinker’s bold and buoyant classic is updated with a new foreword by the author.

©2011 Steven Pinker (P)2011 Brilliance Audio, Inc. Biological Sciences Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Science Mathematics Technology Physiology Computer Science Human Brain Morality Health Consciousness Artificial Intelligence
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What the critics say

“Undeniably brilliant.” ( Newsday)
"Big, brash, and a lot of fun.” ( Time)
“Hugely entertaining.... always sparkling and provoking.” ( Wall Street Journal)
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The book was jam-packed with tons of information. I like thinking about life quite a bit, so I was already aware of some of the concepts mentioned in the book, but the book deepened my understanding of those concepts and about life in general.

I don't know why it is that we as humans have a thirst for knowledge, perhaps it's because evolutionarily speaking, we could use knowledge to outsmart our competitors or increase our chances of survival in the wild. But it is clear that we humans have a thirst for knowledge, and this book had tons of it.

The only downside was that some concepts were not explained in detail. For example, in the book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins added a little more detail about the "tit-for-tat" theory and talked about how there was a competition arranged. Pinker didn't explain the backstory about it. I know this book was very long but having some backstories can go a long way when it comes to making the reader remember certain events. To scientists, these things might be obvious because of how famous the competitors were, but for the rest of us, it's all new information. It's like Pinker explained about chess grandmasters, they don't have a great memory, but they grasp and recall concepts. The concept of a global competition being arranged, and some of the brightest minds competing for a game theory, and Tit-for-tat winning better displays the prowess of this strategy instead of it just being mentioned in the passing (as it was done in this book).

Overall, the book had an abundance of knowledge and definitely worth a read!

Tons of knowledge :)

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This performance brings the book alive, it's feels like a great conversation, and it brings Pinker's sense of humor to live.

Classic book, really well read

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Worth listening to the entire book. it touches on a lot of different ideas and sometimes stays on a single idea too long, just push through and youll be glad you did.

great, but slow at times

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This is a very broad and also detailed work. The first three quarters of the book is a really interesting investigation of mental processes backed up by concrete descriptions of experimental results, with a constant return to the central thesis that the mind evolved to be the way it is. The last part, in which more abstract concepts like altruism, religion, and music are analysed, struck me as more hypothetical and speculative, although the context and reasoning behind his claims are very interesting and well reasoned.

Interesting and thought provoking

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It is an intresting read but i find it to limited in content. It tries to sell very simple ideas and donot address the complex issues.
Being a medical professional with some amount of physchology study. I found the book non engaging to me.
May be i was looking something different.
But still it interesting read.

Interesting read

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