Tons of knowledge :)

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!

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great, but slow at times

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.

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5 people found this helpful

Classic book, really well read

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

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2 people found this helpful

Interesting and thought provoking

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.

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2 people found this helpful

Interesting read

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.

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2 people found this helpful

Bravo!

If i had read this 30 years ago, what great things i may have accomplished!?

This book is a grand symphony. Thank you Mr Pinker

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Couldn't finish it

I usually love Steven Pinker, but the constant meandering into neo-Darwinianism vs getting ihto what we know about how the mind works wore me out.

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1 person found this helpful

An excruciatingly long series of vague observations & descriptions of mundane things.

I’m 4 chapters in, & it seems Pinker has just typed out a stream of consciousness on his verbal musings on 1001 things vaguely or loosely, connected to how the mind works, only in excruciatingly long, drawn out, patronisingly simple ways that are obvious to a high school grader.

Many standalone sentences are things you would say to 5 year olds. (Paraphrasing)
“The hand is a wonderful piece of engineering”
“Monkeys have hair”
“Owls use sound to find mice”
“Humans adapted to walk on 2 legs”
“We have really large brains for our size”
“No painter reproduces every hair of the dog.”
“We see what the painting depicts, but we also see it as, a painting.”

End of statement, no follow up or point. Just a collection of loosely connected statements.

Gee. Well thanks.

For those with more than a passing interest in the way the human brain is structured, how the mind appears to interpret or store information etc, this book is completely useless. Try “maps of meaning” by Prof Jordan Peterson instead.

Next to no discussion of neurons, cortex structure, MRI experiments, electrical brain activity, biology, neurotransmitters, neurology.

Never seeing to get to a point or conclusion, example after analogy after anecdote, over & over again, hour after grinding hour on the audiobook version. Many observations are trotted out, with tenuous connections to the next statement, themes are explored, only to end at a dead end or cul de sac.

“Ok? And?” You may think to yourself. Repeatedly.

He has his narrator blab on so much about of so little consequence, it appears the narrator contractor even got bored of it, and a different narrator jarringly takes over around mid chapter 3.

He will oft talk about the same thing using ad-nauseum, loosely connected statements bordering on the inane- with countless “no sh1t sherlock” statements. One gets the feeling that one is on the receiving end of one of those types of people, explains something 8 different simplistic ways, but still thinks you don’t get it so keeps going until you tell him to stop, that yes, you understood the point, quite some time ago.

The dead horse is beaten, over & over again, to now be pulp.

However, pinker never seems to get to a POINT.

An example of a simplistic statement: That some chimps prefer to swing from tree to tree because their hands are shaped like X.Meanwhile apes prefer to do Y in the trees becuase of hand shape X.

End of statement, onto another. Uhh. Ok?

He spends 10 mins at least talking about how we perceive paintings, but not about color theory, or wavelengths of red light say, or where the vision centre is in the brain, or even maybe having MRIs scan people’s heads as they look at art?

No no, a 10 min patronising, thinking out loud about “we see a flat object but it looks 3d” type explanation.

Thanks tips.

The book appears to be at a 12 year old reading level. I have no idea how the book either won a prize, or has so many 5* reviews.

I can only assume the 5* are from people who didn’t know that an oil painting is a flat object, that evolution is the best current explanation of adaptions, or needed long, drawn out explanations of circus forced perspective fun rooms, and how they make short people look freakishly tall, (ending there, with no attempt at how this confuses the minds vision process)

Pro tip: listen to the audio book at 1.75 speed, and marvel as the passing mins whiz by and observe your growing frustration of the overwhelming urge to yell at the author - “GET TO THE FREAKIN POINT ALREADY”

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