How the Mind Works

I bought this book to gain insight. Instead I found an alchemist trying to discuss chemistry. I should have known from the title. We have/are a brain not a mind. Reading this book is painful. One of his first tasks Pnker undertakes is to criticize behavioral science. He calls it stimulus response. Behavioral science gives six causes for human behavior:
1. Genetic Endowment
2. Pre-natal chemical environment
3. Post-natal chemical environment
4. Classical conditioning(Pavlov)
5. Operant conditioning(Skinner)
6. Traumatic factors
Even Skinnerian conditioning, which he singles out for being stimulus response involves consequences as a major determinant. Behaviorism is a science that like evolution it is selective. Anyone who calls this stimulus response shows complete misunderstanding. Pinker then carries on his ignorance by saying that if a person runs from a burning building it is because they "Believed" they were in danger. He basically uses what he would believe and puts it in the brain of his example. First of all he knows nothing of what another person believes. Second thinking a person that would have to escape any dangerous situation by formulating a belief and then acting on it is just ludicrous. A brain couldn't evolve to function this way. Beliefs are effects. Belief's are conditioned and behavior is conditioned. Just because a belief goes along with a behavior doesn't mean it causes it. Thinking that is superstitious behavior. Our education system is really pathetic. Glad behavioral techniques that were 100% effective in increasing learning skills and self confidence were shelved to fund teaching techniques that saw dramatic declines in learning skills and self confidence. Of course this could only happen in a society where worldviews are conditioned and logic is never automatic, but Pinker hasn't learned observational skills to recognize this. Back to the example. Just because you didn't see all the variables that caused the girl to run from the burning building doesn't mean they don't exist. Your criticism of behaviorism because it can't predict behavior is so inane it is beyond words. Like people that criticize evolution it is because they have no understanding. Behaviorism never would claim to predict behavior. There are billions of variables that determine every unique behavior and the science is a framework to make effective changes through trial and error. You continue your archaic catalog of already answered criticisms by saying Skinner said men don't think. He never said this. Thoughts are superfluous. If they were causes as you claim then what people thought and what they did would be the same. They aren't and never will. Thoughts are unverbalized speech that are triggered and sometimes go along with behavior. It is real world stimuli(experiences) and their interaqction with the brain that determines behavior. If you weren't conditioned to swallow all the cultural BS maybe you could see science always disproves the presuppositions our culture conditons many to accept. No the Sun doesn't revolve around the Earth. Yes we are products of our environment. This may be predictably dismissed by a culture conditioned to shiver at these words, but understanding this is the only way we will ever make effecdtive, positive changes to improve the human condition. A shame your book is doing everything one can to set us back hundreds of years. What is your real name? Nim Chimpsky. BTW your language book is another pathetic exercise in ignorance. B.F. Skinner's book is definitive and actually creates a philosphy that allows for effective changes. Time will expose your ignorance, but I am living now, so I want to let everyone know B.F. Skinner was the only person that was right and did useful work. His science is evolutionarily sound and hope our culture has of making effective, postive changes. This book is sad.

As a person trained in science, but no formal training in neuroscience except for what's covered in general biology and introductory psychology texts, I found the book to be exactly what I was looking for; a connection with a science for the lay person. The things Pinker discloses in the book may be too elementary to be considered interesting for neuroscience experts, but personally I was blown away by its contents. It introduced me to the concept of evolutionary psychology, which is a refreshing analytical alternative to a lot of the psychobabble posing as science that's out there. In fact, it's the only theory of our psychology that's ever been of use to me, and I imagine it will be the only one that empirical evidence will continue to support as we find out more about the human mind. I don't agree wholesale with everything that he said, but the book is a wealth of information nonetheless.
Pinker has a writing style that is very digestible and I found most of the technical aspects well-explained and easy to get through. If you want to know about human psychology, while not being bored to death or getting your head filled with silly ideas, read this book.

This book s a highly readable narrative about the inner workings of th human brain as discerned by a cognitive scientist, psychologist, and linguist. It is highly informative without reading like a textbook. I liked it very much and am glad I read it.

This book was not exactly what I was looking for as a police investigator. As a criminal investigator I am constantly on the look out for insights into the human thought process as manifested in speech and action. In that context. This book is not quite what I was looking for. In all fairness, few books are. My interests are fairly specialized.

This book is nonetheless, very educational and illuminating. As a person who practices a Christian Philosphy, and a daily Bible reader and student, it appeared to me that the author gently makes a clear case for atheism, without being doctrinal or didactic. I do not mind that as it provides plenty of fuel for philisophical contemplation.

In summary, if one is looking for a book about the human mind that is informative, but not a text book, one might consider this one. Thank You...

The author is a well-known and recognized expert in psychology and cognitive neurosciences. He is an absolute authority at an academically level. He is also an excellent speaker, the web is full of his lectures, conferences, interviews, all of them very interesting.
Very interesting is also this book dedicated to the human mind and how it works. It’s a well-documented book, rich of data and information, which is based on two fundamental theories, both of them fully embraced by Pinker.
The first theory is about the "computational brain"; the second theory is about the "selfish gene."
The first part of the book, the longest and most informative (and sometimes too boring and detailed, which is the reason why I am giving only 4 stars to this book), is in fact devoted to the explanation and mechanisms of the computational brain (Pinker is actually the major champion of such a theory).
According to Pinker "the mind is a system of organs of computation (designed by natural selection to solve the problems posed to our ancestors by their status as hunter-gatherers) that allowed our ancestors to understand and outsmart objects, animals, plants, and each other”.
The mind is what the brain does. In particular, the brain processes information and thinking is a kind of computation. This allows us to do many comparisons and connections between a human brain and a compute, and open the way to the concept of artificial intelligence. However Pinker shows, in a very clear and effective way, why a robot very unlikely will ever have a brain that functions even remotely to that of a man, despite the similarities in their working mode.
Furthermore, according to Pinker, intelligence is the pursuit of objectives beyond obstacles. Without goals, the same concept of intelligence is meaningless. This idea opens the way to the pages that include the emotional and relational aspects, those based on the theory of the "selfish gene" (theory formulated by the biologist Dawkins, as a way of expressing the gene-centered view of evolution). This is the richest and stimulating part of the book, in my opinion, and it definitely deserves the 5 stars.
Beyond any adherence to the philosophical part of this theory (which apparently, but only apparently in my opinion, leads to an absolute atheism, which Pinker professes as a convinced Darwinian), the "selfish genes" explain very well the cognitive and behavioral patterns of the human brain. Hence the importance of evolutionary emotions, overcoming the abstract concept of the triune brain proposed by Mac Lean many years ago.
The genes are "selfish", in the sense that they are equipped with a sort of "natural instinct" of self-assertion and self-reproduction, and thanks to the mechanism of natural selection they "wire" the human brains (and those of other animals) in such a way as to reach their goals. The "wiring" consists of the neuronal patterns that are created at birth and grow stronger with the experiences of life. According to Pinker, "behavioral and cognitive tactics as assertiveness and conservatism are attributes like any other and, after having invested many resources on them during the childhood, a young person becomes increasingly reluctant to go through the learning curve to grow new strategies to relate to others”.
In very concrete terms, Pinker acknowledges that human personalities described by psychologists, namely those of the model B-5 (expressiveness (extroversion-introversion); neuroticism (anxiety-stability); amiability (agreeableness -antagonism); conscientiousness (reliability-superficiality ); openness (imaginative-closed)) are the results of: 50% genetics, 45% chance and only 5% environment and especially parents education.
I have bluntly summarized what Pinker explains in a much more articulated and argued way.
Certainly I strongly suggest reading the last part of this book to all those who are interested in psychology and neurosciences.

Steven Arthur Pinker (born 1954) is a Canadian-born experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and professor at Harvard University. He wrote in the Preface to this 1997 book, "Any book called 'How the Mind Works' had better begin on a note of humility, and I will begin with two. First, we don't understand how the mind works---not nearly as well as we understand how the body works... Then why the audacious title?... When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like. I wrote this book because dozens of mysteries of the mind... have recently been upgraded to problems... Second... Few of the ideas in the pages to follow are mine... My goal was to weave the ideas into a cohesive picture using two even bigger ideas... the computational theory of mind and the theory of natural selection of replicators. The opening chapter presents the big picture: that the mind is a system of organs of computation designed by natural selection to solve the problems faced by our evolutionary ancestors in their foraging way of life..." (Pg. ix-x) [NOTE: page references herein refer to the 660-page 1997 hardcover edition.]

He argues, "Either we dispense with all morality as an unscientific superstition, or we find a way to reconcile causation (genetic or otherwise) with responsibility and free will... I believe that science and ethics are two self-contained systems played out among the same entities in the world... The science game treats people as material objects... The ethics game treats people as equivalent, sentient, rational, free-willed agents... Free will is an idealization of human beings that makes the ethics game playable." (Pg. 55)

He suggests, "Why should you buy the computational theory of mind? Because it has solved millennia-old problems in philosophy, kicked off the computer revolution, posed the significant questions of neuroscience, and provided psychology with a magnificently fruitful research agenda." (Pg. 77) But he later admits, "Consciousness presents us with puzzle after puzzle. How can a neural event cause consciousness to happen? What good is consciousness? That is, what does the raw sensation of redness add...? Any EFFECT of perceiving something as red... could be accomplished by pure information processing triggered by a sensor for long-wavelength light... And if consciousness is useless---if a creature without it could negotiate the world as well as a creature with it---why would natural selection have favored the conscious one?" (Pg. 132) After listing eight questions that a theory of sentience must address, he concedes, "Beats the heck out of me! I have some prejudices, but no idea of how to begin to look for a defensible answer. And neither does anyone else. The computational theory of mind offers no insight; neither does any finding in neuroscience." (Pg. 145-147)

He sums up, "This book has been about the adaptive design of the major components of the mind, but that does not mean that I believe that everything the mind does is biologically adaptive. The mind ... is driven by goal states that served biological fitness in ancestral environments, such as food, sex, safety, parenthood, friendship, status, and knowledge. That tookbox, however, can be used to assemble Sunday afternoon projects of dubious adaptive value." (Pg. 524) He adds, "I will conclude by arguing that some of the activities we consider most profound are nonadaptive by-products." (Pg. 525)

He concludes: "Some problems continue to baffle the modern mind... consciousness in the sense of sentience or subjective experience... Another imponderable is the self... Free will is another enigma... A fourth puzzle is meaning... Knowledge is just as perplexing... A final conundrum is morality... People have thought about these problems for millennia but have made no progress in solving them. They give us a sense of bewilderment, or intellectual vertigo... Philosophical problems have a feeling of the divine, and the favorite solution in most times and places is mysticism and religion... The problem with the religious solution was stated by Mencken when he wrote, 'Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing." (Pg. 558-560)

This stimulating and refreshingly frank book will be of great interest to anyone studying cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind, or related fields.

Steven Arthur Pinker (born 1954) is a Canadian-born experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and professor at Harvard University. He wrote in the Preface to this 1997 book, "Any book called 'How the Mind Works' had better begin on a note of humility, and I will begin with two. First, we don't understand how the mind works---not nearly as well as we understand how the body works... Then why the audacious title?... When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like. I wrote this book because dozens of mysteries of the mind... have recently been upgraded to problems... Second... Few of the ideas in the pages to follow are mine... My goal was to weave the ideas into a cohesive picture using two even bigger ideas... the computational theory of mind and the theory of natural selection of replicators. The opening chapter presents the big picture: that the mind is a system of organs of computation designed by natural selection to solve the problems faced by our evolutionary ancestors in their foraging way of life..." (Pg. ix-x) [NOTE: page references herein refer to the 660-page 1997 hardcover edition.]

He argues, "Either we dispense with all morality as an unscientific superstition, or we find a way to reconcile causation (genetic or otherwise) with responsibility and free will... I believe that science and ethics are two self-contained systems played out among the same entities in the world... The science game treats people as material objects... The ethics game treats people as equivalent, sentient, rational, free-willed agents... Free will is an idealization of human beings that makes the ethics game playable." (Pg. 55)

He suggests, "Why should you buy the computational theory of mind? Because it has solved millennia-old problems in philosophy, kicked off the computer revolution, posed the significant questions of neuroscience, and provided psychology with a magnificently fruitful research agenda." (Pg. 77) But he later admits, "Consciousness presents us with puzzle after puzzle. How can a neural event cause consciousness to happen? What good is consciousness? That is, what does the raw sensation of redness add...? Any EFFECT of perceiving something as red... could be accomplished by pure information processing triggered by a sensor for long-wavelength light... And if consciousness is useless---if a creature without it could negotiate the world as well as a creature with it---why would natural selection have favored the conscious one?" (Pg. 132) After listing eight questions that a theory of sentience must address, he concedes, "Beats the heck out of me! I have some prejudices, but no idea of how to begin to look for a defensible answer. And neither does anyone else. The computational theory of mind offers no insight; neither does any finding in neuroscience." (Pg. 145-147)

He sums up, "This book has been about the adaptive design of the major components of the mind, but that does not mean that I believe that everything the mind does is biologically adaptive. The mind ... is driven by goal states that served biological fitness in ancestral environments, such as food, sex, safety, parenthood, friendship, status, and knowledge. That tookbox, however, can be used to assemble Sunday afternoon projects of dubious adaptive value." (Pg. 524) He adds, "I will conclude by arguing that some of the activities we consider most profound are nonadaptive by-products." (Pg. 525)

He concludes: "Some problems continue to baffle the modern mind... consciousness in the sense of sentience or subjective experience... Another imponderable is the self... Free will is another enigma... A fourth puzzle is meaning... Knowledge is just as perplexing... A final conundrum is morality... People have thought about these problems for millennia but have made no progress in solving them. They give us a sense of bewilderment, or intellectual vertigo... Philosophical problems have a feeling of the divine, and the favorite solution in most times and places is mysticism and religion... The problem with the religious solution was stated by Mencken when he wrote, 'Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing." (Pg. 558-560)

This stimulating and refreshingly frank book will be of great interest to anyone studying cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind, or related fields.

Steven Arthur Pinker (born 1954) is a Canadian-born experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and professor at Harvard University. He wrote in the Preface to this 1997 book, "Any book called 'How the Mind Works' had better begin on a note of humility, and I will begin with two. First, we don't understand how the mind works---not nearly as well as we understand how the body works... Then why the audacious title?... When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like. I wrote this book because dozens of mysteries of the mind... have recently been upgraded to problems... Second... Few of the ideas in the pages to follow are mine... My goal was to weave the ideas into a cohesive picture using two even bigger ideas... the computational theory of mind and the theory of natural selection of replicators. The opening chapter presents the big picture: that the mind is a system of organs of computation designed by natural selection to solve the problems faced by our evolutionary ancestors in their foraging way of life..." (Pg. ix-x) [NOTE: page references herein refer to the 660-page 1997 hardcover edition.]

He argues, "Either we dispense with all morality as an unscientific superstition, or we find a way to reconcile causation (genetic or otherwise) with responsibility and free will... I believe that science and ethics are two self-contained systems played out among the same entities in the world... The science game treats people as material objects... The ethics game treats people as equivalent, sentient, rational, free-willed agents... Free will is an idealization of human beings that makes the ethics game playable." (Pg. 55)

He suggests, "Why should you buy the computational theory of mind? Because it has solved millennia-old problems in philosophy, kicked off the computer revolution, posed the significant questions of neuroscience, and provided psychology with a magnificently fruitful research agenda." (Pg. 77) But he later admits, "Consciousness presents us with puzzle after puzzle. How can a neural event cause consciousness to happen? What good is consciousness? That is, what does the raw sensation of redness add...? Any EFFECT of perceiving something as red... could be accomplished by pure information processing triggered by a sensor for long-wavelength light... And if consciousness is useless---if a creature without it could negotiate the world as well as a creature with it---why would natural selection have favored the conscious one?" (Pg. 132) After listing eight questions that a theory of sentience must address, he concedes, "Beats the heck out of me! I have some prejudices, but no idea of how to begin to look for a defensible answer. And neither does anyone else. The computational theory of mind offers no insight; neither does any finding in neuroscience." (Pg. 145-147)

He sums up, "This book has been about the adaptive design of the major components of the mind, but that does not mean that I believe that everything the mind does is biologically adaptive. The mind ... is driven by goal states that served biological fitness in ancestral environments, such as food, sex, safety, parenthood, friendship, status, and knowledge. That tookbox, however, can be used to assemble Sunday afternoon projects of dubious adaptive value." (Pg. 524) He adds, "I will conclude by arguing that some of the activities we consider most profound are nonadaptive by-products." (Pg. 525)

He concludes: "Some problems continue to baffle the modern mind... consciousness in the sense of sentience or subjective experience... Another imponderable is the self... Free will is another enigma... A fourth puzzle is meaning... Knowledge is just as perplexing... A final conundrum is morality... People have thought about these problems for millennia but have made no progress in solving them. They give us a sense of bewilderment, or intellectual vertigo... Philosophical problems have a feeling of the divine, and the favorite solution in most times and places is mysticism and religion... The problem with the religious solution was stated by Mencken when he wrote, 'Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing." (Pg. 558-560)

This stimulating and refreshingly frank book will be of great interest to anyone studying cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind, or related fields.

The human mind evolved through natural selection to do certain things that made us better able to survive and to have offspring in the environment in which we evolved. Pinker repeatedly reminds the reader of these two points as he explains how different parts of the mind work. Our mind evolved abilities which we can then apply to purposes that are different than the purposes for which they evolved. Pinker suggests that much of our logical reasoning evolved to let us engage in reciprocal altruism, in which we need to be able to detect people who want the benefits of our help without helping us in return. But now that we have the ability of logical reasoning we can apply it to purposes aside from cheater detection, like solving Sudoku. Also, we have natural abilities to count, to measure, to shape, to estimate, to move, etc. that can be applied with some effort to thinking about mathematical abstractions. "How can people use their Stone Age minds to wield high-tech mathematical instruments? The first way is to set mental modules to work on objects other than the ones they were designed for." (p. 341)

Much of the book is an argument against our minds being blank slates, or that we have a general purpose intelligence which can be shaped in arbitrary ways. Pinker says that, "The evolutionary psychology of this book is a departure from the dominant view of the human mind in our intellectual tradition, which Tooby and Cosmides have dubbed the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM)." (p. 44)

I liked what Pinker had to say about emotions. We need emotions to set our goals. Once I have goals I can then apply rational thought to attain these goals. But even once I have decided what my goals our, there may be several tasks which I need to carry out and emotions help me choose between these. If I have to pack a dresser into a box, there may be no good reason to start with one drawer instead of another, but I have to make an arbitrary decision and a burst of energy can get me going. Pinker writes, "And here is the key to why we have emotions. An animal cannot pursue all its goals at once." (p. 373) This is because "No rational creature can consult rules all the way down; that way infinite regress lies. At some point a thinker must execute a rule, because he just can't help it: it's the human way, a matter of course, the only appropriate and natural thing to do- in short, an instinct." (p. 185) If I have many tasks that have to be done, it's helpful to have emotional heuristics that will tell me to do one thing first, because it can be too computationally expensive to decide what the optimal course of action is.

“Once we have isolated the computational and neurological correlates of access-consciousness, there is nothing left to explain. It's just irrational to insist that sentience remains unexplained after all the manifestations of sentience have been accounted for, just because the computations don't have anything sentient in them. It's like insisting that wetness remains unexplained even after all the manifestations of wetness have been accounted for, because moving molecules aren't wet.”
' Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works

See Jackson's "Mary" (1986).

Classic begging the question conjoined with scientific precommitment.

The goal of this book is dramatically important: combine the computational theory of the mind and the theory of the natural replicators. After all, the mind is designed to attain a maximum number of copies of the genes that created it. In a nutshell: mind and evolution.
"The mind is a neural computer, fitted by natural selection with combinatorial algorithms for causal and probabilistic reasoning ... It is driven by goal states that served biological fitness in ancestral environments, such as food, sex, safety, parenthood, friendship, status, and knowledge." (p.524)
Does Prof. Pinker achieve this goal?
He clearly states from the beginning that his theory is only a model and that he has absolutely no intention to explain how the brain 'really' works.
But, he is immediately confronted with the 'subject or qualia problem': the fact that consciousness is a personal experience and that other people have absolutely no notion of, for instance, the pain someone else feels.
The solution for Prof. Pinker is the one proposed by D. Dennett: sentient experiences are cognitive illusions.
'Once we have isolated the computational and neurological correlates of access-consciousness, there is nothing left to explain.(p.147)
It is a kind of solution called in psychology 'behaviourism' (no matter what the guy feels or thinks, if only his behaviour is fine).
It is clear that the behaviour of somebody is totally different from the pain he feels, although both will be correlated.
Into the bargain, G. Edelman, V. Ramachandran, J.R. Searle and others demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt that the brain doesn't work like a computer.
Prof. Pinker gives good examples of how the brain could process information and how thinking could be explained as a kind of computation.
But ultimately he has to throw in the towel and admits himself "perhaps we cannot solve conundrums like free will and sentience." (p.561)
So why should this book be read? Not for the 'mind' content, but for the 'evolution' part.
It treats very important and interesting items like: Why do we advertise emotions on our face? Why is the work of Margaret Mead a real scam? Why is Darwin's theory so progressive? Why sex? Why is religion a technique for success? Why pro-Westermarck and anti-Freud?

With the rapid advance of computer technology, one wonders how much longer it will be before we see a machine capable of duplicating the human brain. Will we see a "Data" or a "C-3PO" in our lifetimes? Or how about something slightly simpler like the "HAL-9000" from "2001: A Space Odyssey"? My personal opinion is that, someday, these things will be possible--though I don't see them appearing in the next 50 to 100 years.
With "How the Mind Works", author Steven Pinker endeavors to show us just how complex our brain (hardware) and the "software" that runs on it truly is. He does this by illustrating how incredibly difficult it would be to create a machine that could duplicate even the simplest of human mental tasks.
Take the simple act of seeing and recognizing an automobile. Such an event is so commonplace for us that we hardly even think about it. But try to create a computer that can do the same and difficulties immediately arise.
When you see an automobile, your mind must reference a kind of "object" library (computer programmers will see what I'm getting at here). An object such as "CAR" must have certain traits and characteristics associated with it--for example, has four wheels, carries people, has an internal combustion engine, travels on streets and highways. In this way, even when you see a new, one-of-a-kind, vehicle you will immediately recognize it because it has the traits and characteristics of the "CAR" prototype stored in your mind.
Now try to imagine a computer that can do the same thing. What if I were to show this computer a toy car? an abstract painting of a car? or a non-street-legal dune buggy? But this is just the beginning of "How the Mind Works." There's much more.
After establishing the amazing complexity of the human mind, Pinker goes on to explore how and why the brain evolved into its present state. It is this, second half, of the book that I found most fascinating. Borrowing from the fields of Anthropology, Psychology, Sociology, and heavily from the pioneering work in "Evolutionary Psychology" conducted at U.C. Santa Barbara, the author will demystify all but a few of our human behaviors.
At times "How the Mind Works" is heavy going. But the reader with a hunger for scientific understanding of human nature will find it well worth the effort.
--COMPUTER ENGINEERING STUDENT

Two ideas run throughout this attempt to answer some very big questions: how the human mind got the way it is, how it works, and how people directed by minds interact with each other in society. One idea is "don't ignore the data": Pinker's explanations of how vision and perception work build on what experiments show, and are careful not to add anything based on what might make sense, but is not borne out by the data. The other idea, related, is that Darwinian evolution is not, as it's often understood, "survival of the fittest". It is something much more boring and precise. Random genetic changes, whose performance, expressed in a human being's life, lead to actually producing fewer children, die out. Genetic changes that lead to people who have more children, survive. At any given generation, the more "fit" genes are more common. Perhaps you can identify the people with those more common, "fit" genes, perhaps you can't.

Pinker takes these two ideas and does pretty well at explaining a whole lot of human perception and behavior. But from there to any conclusions about how we should behave, or even how we should best live with ourselves and each other, is way out of scope. So if you're prepared to read an interesting book, say "Aha!" a few times, but to keep yourself in check about applying what you've learned, then go for it.

Steven Pinker is Professor of Psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the renowned books, `The language instinct' (Penguin, 1995) and `Words and rules: the ingredients of language' (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000). In this book, described by one reviewer as `the best book ever written on the human mind', he puts forward a general theory about how and why the human mind works the way it does. Yet it is not a ponderous book; it is beautifully written and full of jokes and stories.
Pinker marries Darwin's theory of evolution to the latest developments in neuroscience and computation. He shows in detail how the process of natural selection shaped our entire neurological networks; how the struggle for survival selects from among our genes those most fit to flourish in our environment. Nature has produced in us bodies, brains and minds attuned to coping intelligently with whatever our environment demands. Housed in our bodies, our minds structure neural networks into adaptive programmes for handling our perceptions. Pinker concludes, "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."
Our beliefs and desires are information, allowing us to create meaning. "Beliefs are inscriptions in memory, desires are goal inscriptions, thinking is computation, perceptions are inscriptions triggered by sensors, trying is executing operations triggered by a goal." Pinker writes that the mind has a `design stance' for dealing with artefacts, a `physical stance' for dealing with objects, and an `intentional stance' for dealing with people. "Causal and inferential roles tend to be in sync because natural selection designed both our perceptual and our inferential modules to work accurately, most of the time, in this world." With this down-to-earth kind of explanation, there is no need to invoke mysterious intangible powers: "We don't need spirits or occult forces to explain intelligence." Pinker sums up the recent amazing developments in neurobiology and cognitive science. This book, like those by his colleagues Daniel Dennett (`Darwin's dangerous idea' and `Consciousness explained') and Richard Dawkins (`River out of Eden' and `Unweaving the rainbow'), should be required reading. They are all Darwinians, but then why shouldn't they be? It is just like saying that all physicists are Einsteinians nowadays, or that all poets and playwrights are Shakespeareans, or that all osteopaths are Stillians. Their books make Karl Popper, so hostile to Darwin, and Californian gurus like Fritjof Capra, sadly outdated.
Good science, like Darwinism generally, in no way undermines osteopathy. In fact, by giving coherent, intelligible accounts of the ways in which our bodies and minds have evolved, writers like Pinker can help us to understand better how and why our bodies work in the ways they do.

The title of this book is something of a misnomer. The book is about more than just the mind: it is about the entire human being, with special focus on the motivational complexes stemming, in part at least, from innate, genetic factors within the human organism. Pinker discusses human nature from the viewpoint of evolutionary psychology. "Our physical organs owe their complex design to the information in the human genome," Pinker argues, "and so, I believe, do our mental organs." Starting from this premise, he attempts to "reverse engineer" the innate characteristics of human beings, assuming that man's genetic endowment is shaped by natural selection. "Reverse-engineering is possible only when one has a hint of what the device was designed to accomplish," Pinker argues. And what, may we ask, was the human device meant to accomplish? Well, since most of the evolution affecting the human mind and human motivational psychology took place during the hunterer-gatherer stage of human development, the human device was engineered to spread its genetics under conditions affecting men when they lived on the savannahs in Africa. This curious thesis, which many will automatically dismiss as absurd, is, under Pinker's advocacy, far more convincing then one would assume at first glance. Pinker marshals a host of fascinating evidence which demonstrates that, whether his basic thesis is correct or not, it certainly cannot be dismissed as implausible.
But the real value of the book is not so much its espousal of the controversial theories stemming out of evolutionary psychology, but its brilliantly empirical description of human nature. From the very start, Pinker admits that his book represents "a departure from the dominant view of the human mind in our intellectual tradition, which [is known as] the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM)." According to the SSSM, human nature is largely the product of arbitrary cultural factors. Rejecting an innate human nature, SSSM goes on to conclude that social engineers (e.g., Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro) can make of human beings what they please. This point of view, which is seen as "progressive" and benign, is totalitarian in practice. As Pinker points out, "If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified."
The issue over whether human nature is innate is probably the most important question facing social theorists and political philosophers. Pinker's innate biological view of the human mind leads him to adopt what is essentially the view of conservatives and traditional Christianity: the view, in short, that human beings are limited in their moral and spiritual potential, that, in other words, they are tainted by their biological inheritance. Ironically, Pinker, a materialist, Darwinist and atheist believes in a scientific version of the Christian doctrine of original sin. Christians and evolutionists have long been at odds over cosmology, but on the nature of man, they more or less speak with the same voice. After more 500 pages of analyzing the scientific evidence relating to human nature, Pinker concludes with the following sobering assessment: "No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another." Pinker's book is important precisely because it refutes once and for all the romantic notion that human nature is essentially good. For this reason alone, the book must be regarded as essential reading.

Steven Pinker begins his explanation of "How the Mind Works" arguing that the mind is best understood in terms of a computational model and that, in part, by reverse engineering the mind one can understand many aspects of cognition. He also examines why aspects of cognition, such as consciousness, knowledge, meaning, free will, self, morality, etc. still remain beyond the purview of cognitive science. Pinker identifies natural selection as the process which shaped the mind; subsequently, history, cognitive and social psychology, and human ecology are the most important factors which for him continue to shape the mind. The significance of the book lies, in part, in Pinker's differentiation of what reverse engineering can show from what is still beyond the tools of cognitive science. Pinker suggests that the reason biologically unnecessary aspects of human behavior such as language, art, wit, music, literature, etc. are so significant to people and remain problematic may be because scientists don't yet have the cognitive equipment to solve them and suggests that consciousness and free will, for example, may ultimately remain elusive aspects of the mind.
By arguing that "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," (21) Pinker rejects most other views of the mind that have held sway in the last century. By insisting on the complexity of the mind, Pinker claims that a) thinking is a kind of computation used to work with configurations of symbols, b) that the mind is organized into specialized modules or mental organs, c) that the basic logic of the modules is contained in our genetic program, and d) that natural selection shaped these operations to facilitate replication of genes into the next generation (21, 25). Pinker thus shows that the computational model of mind is highly significant because it has solved not only philosophical problems, but also started the computer revolution, posed important neuroscience questions, and provided psychology with a very valuable research agenda (77).
By examining mental processes which are reverse-engineerable, Pinker lays the groundwork for examining which cognitive processes aren't yet understandable. For example, chapter 4, "The Mind's Eye," describes how the mind's vision process turns retinal images into mental representations, how the mind moves "splashes of light to concepts of objects, and beyond them to a kind of interaction between seeing and thinking known as mental imagery" (214). By describing a specific modular process, Pinker shows how this modular process fits together like a puzzle, as well as with other parts of the mind. Taken together the chapters thus also show what processes, such as sentience and especially consciousness, are still not readily explained.
Pinker asks not only how scientists might understand "the psychology of the arts, humor, religion, and philosophy within the theme of this book, that the mind is a naturally selected neural computer" but also why they are so resistantly inscrutable (521). He suggests that the arts "engage not only the psychology of aesthetics but the psychology of status," thus making the arts more readily understood by economics and social psychology (521).
According to Pinker, consciousness, too, resists understanding. He asks: "How could an event of neural information-processing cause the feel of a toothache or the taste of lemon or the color purple?" (558) thus highlighting the important 'Gordian-knot' question of causality in consciousness. In suggesting that such questions are difficult because Homo Sapiens' minds don't have the cognitive equipment to solve them, "because our minds are organs, not pipelines to truth" (561), he emphasizes the significance of natural selection in shaping the mind to solve matters of life and death for our ancestors (356) and leaves open the possibility of explaining consciousness at a later date. Pinker's book is significant, therefore, because it explains both how many aspects of the mind work, as well as what we don't yet know about how the mind works. In his conclusion, Pinker offers only tentative answers about why scientists don't understand consciousness, for example, and leaves open the possibility that we may never understand it.

I'm an experimental psychology major who loves to read books on this subject. One of my friends bought this for me as a gift and I read it in about 3 days. It was very hard to put down, but at the same time, it felt very tedious. There is A LOT of information packed into the ~600 pages of this book, but it's so interesting it ends up being hard to put down anyway.

I would recommend this to anyone interested in cognitive psychology but be warned: you might need a little background in psychology, maybe a little logic, and an understanding of the theory of evolution to enjoy this.

The two leitmotifs of this stimulating book are "the computational theory of mind" and the theory that the mind is an array of "mental organs" that have evolved through natural selection. Kind of like Babbage and Turing meet Darwin and Dawkins. Pinker pulls together material from many sources to illustrate these theories and weaves them together into a compelling overview of the mind.
The computational bits left me feeling out of my depth at several points, but also feeling reassured that this wasn't science lite. And while the evolutionary bits were less challenging - and easier to read - they offered more than enough food for thought.
Apparently some people find the computation plus evolution theory controversial. Others find the ideas old hat. And Pinker himself seems to rub plenty of people up the wrong way for various reasons. Myself, I find the arguments fresh and convincing, and Pinker very enjoyable to read. He covers an awful lot of ground with great gusto, he packs the detail in and makes his points with wry humour.
"How the mind works" is a book to read once to get the gist and a second time to get the detail.

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Oh ha. I wrote a long thoughtful review, posted it, and something went wrong - gone. This will be shorter.

Judging from the nearly bimodal reactions I can say it's not for everyone. And of course not- it's about evolutionary psychology, and some people find ES to be pap. I, on the other hand, rather like it -- I find it compelling. Some of his ideas are speculative, but they're never absurd. Granted, it will be nice to have more hared evidence though.

Enough defensiveness. Once one buys into the premise that brain affects behavior and that natural selection helps to mold the brain, then it's not much of a stretch to really, really, enjoy this book. I find I can nearly flip it open and read aloud.

Pinker's description of the computational theory of the mind was impressive in its raw simplicity, but I particularly liked his chapters on vision, and the one called Family Values which commented on relationships between spouses, dates, parents/children, siblings, relatives, acquaintances, enemies, rivals, and strangers. But there is so much more: Free will, ethics, why human brains ascended (and not groundsquirrels'), the practial purpose of feelings, why we like music and know simple math (but not higher math) and of course he takes a requisite swipe at the Standard Social Science Model. He decimates this later, in The Blank Slate.

Don't worry that this book was written in 1997. It's not only still worth reading, it'll be worth re-reading. Pinker's prose is a conversational and lighthearted - but it's content-rich and moves along nicely. If you don't like what he's saying, it may sound glib. But if you're like me, you'll simply devour this book. And you'll get your money's worth - my copy (original paperback) is 566 pages long, with another 100 for endnotes, references, and index.

Sorry you missed my other review - it was so much better. :)

Pinker is a tremendously exciting thinker with a gift for analogy and pattern recognition that rivals, say, John Updike, Camille Paglia, and Dave Barry at their best. His gift for illustrating the most abstruse workings of the mind with dead-on-the-money examples from the Godfather, or The Simpsons, or the Rolling Stones seems to annoy many (humorless and not really-as-smart-as-they-think-they-are) people no end. Too bad for them.
Another reason for the sniffy tone of many of these readers' comments is Pinker's political incorrectness. He considers the Standard Social Science Model of thinking about humanity to be a disaster for American intellectual life. ... The one weakness in Pinker's approach is that he tries to restrict the science of human nature to just how all human brains are similar. He's not as self-assured (or bigoted) about this in this book, as in his previous bestseller "The Language Instinct," but he still acts as if studying how brains differ is totally boring. Of course, he can't actually NOT study mental differences becaus similarities and differences are the warp and woof of information. If we were all the same, you couldn't get a grip on how our brains work. Thus, vast amounts of the data he uses about how (supposedly) all brains work comes from comparisons of healthy brains to stroke-victims and other tragically defective brains. Further illustrating this point, the last third of his book deals mostly with sex differences. ... Psychological research has been divided for over a century into the followers of Wundt (like Pinker), the "experimental psychologists," who emphasize how brains are alike versus the followers of Galton (like Arthur Jensen), the "differential psychologists," who emphasize how brains differ. This artificial divide is finally collapsing: see Jensen's new "The g Factor" for a detailed account of how the "differential" IQ researchers are using traditional ! "experimental" laboratory techniques like PET scans. The future belongs to the synthesists who are equally concerned with both similarities and differences. ... The problem with this, of course, is that humans tend to differ in somewhat predictable patterns. (1) It's now respectable in the harder sciences to discuss sex differences: in fact, evolutionary psychology largely consists of the study of sex differences. (2) However, the study of sexual orientation differences, especially between gay men and lesbians, who differ radically on dozens of traits remains largely off limits. (3) The great taboo, however, is the 3rd dimension of difference: race. (Note how Jensen's masterpiece has been almost utterly ignored.) ... The greatest untouched territory in the study of human nature are the fascinating correlations between sex and race. For example, a topic that psychology has yet to examine in any formal fashion is nerdishness, even though the public is fascinated by it at present (no doubt due to the rise of Bill Gates). Clearly, this is a heavily male trait. Clearly, it also differs by race with Northeast Asians being more nerdish on average than whites who tend to be more nerdish than West Africans. Just as clearly, though, African-Americans tend to be more stereotypically male in musculature and personality than whites and especially) Asian-Americans. ... The great choice confronting Pinker is whether to honestly examine race, or to limit himself to just marginally pushing the envelope of what can be politely discussed. ... Steve Sailer

He approaches the mind exactly how I would like: from an evolutionary and solid psychological point of view that tries to work towards brain structure and neurons. An improved version of this would be nice to have before studying brain structure, neurons, or A.I. It requires spanning an ocean of knowledge and viewpoints, which he does well. He spent too much text on anecdotes or examples rather than getting to the meat. Even after wading through simple examples, which were sometimes interesting or humorous, I would discover that the meat was just not there, or tucked away in 2 or 3 undefined words for those "trained in the art". Very often his ideas and anecdotes had fatal errors, but it's understandable because he's trying to cover so much in so many fields.

His objective was extremely difficult and wide-ranging. I loved his approach and way of thinking. Following a distinct outline would have been better. No single person would be able to fill in the blanks that this book creates. But it would be great if someday it could be rewritten by a collaboration of 10 genuises that are able to convey the meat with less text.

So I give high marks on approach and breadth of topics covered, but medium to low on conveyance (time is valuable) and correctness. There are few who could have filled out his outline much better.

I became interested in how the mind works as part of my research into the topic of the conscious web. I asked the question "what is consciousness?" and I figured out Pinker's book was a good place to start. Ray Kurzweil also quoted Pinker frequently in Kurzweil's book "The Age of Spiritual Machines" which I also loved. So although I just started with a single question I learned a lot more then I thought I would. I really appreciated Pinker's efforts to explain the mind as a series of interconnected processing units, where each processing unit needed to be understood from an evolutionary basis. He calls this "Natural Computation" and the concepts are very useful in explaining many aspects of the mind. I learned not just about models of consciousness being a model of the real world in our own brain where we exist in that model but also about topics like raising kids, dealing with family issues, emotions and the biological/evolutionary basis of love.
The book has been researched very well. This book has excellent notes and a large list of references for further reading.
My only criticism about this book is that Pinker sometimes draws on an unnecessarily large vocabulary, making his points difficult to understand in some parts. A little stronger editing might have helped here. How often do you use the word "palimpsest" in ordinary conversation? This is good if you want to expand your vocabulary but painful at times.
But all-in-all Pinker has done a great job explaining how the mind works. The title is correct.

Every chapter has its worthy insights and because you quickly realize that you will keep reading even when the material presented seems to be not relevant and then surprise, a revelation or idea you hadn't thought of. The complexity of the human mind that this book reveals leaves the idea of machine-based intelligence that could replicate a sentinent human, remaining in the realm of science fiction even now, 20 years after it's publication.

I did not agree with everything Pinker stated in his book and I wonder whether even Pinker completely believed what he wrote. At times (more toward the end of the book) he seemed to be spewing little more than interesting speculation. Nonetheless, I loved reading this book, if not for it's authoritative conclusions (of which there are plenty), than for its though provoking discussions.
In the early chapters of the book, Pinker is meticulous in describing the information processing theory of mind-the book is worth buying simply for this chapter alone. However, there is much more to his book than this. In a most engaging style which Pinker seems to have mastered, he describes the extraordinary complexities involved with seemingly ordinary things such as identifying object in our visual field and moving about our environment.
I also appreciated his writings on "Psychological Correctness" where he is effective in separating moral dilemmas from scientific ones. Furthermore, in the section entitled, "Get Smart" Pinker writes about the fallacy in thinking that intelligence is somehow the necessary culmination of evolution. I particularly appreciated this section. He approaches it with authority and humor-at times I was laughing out loud.
As the book progresses, it is no less entertaining, however it is far less authoritative. Pinker puts forth some of the most interesting speculation, some of which makes sense and some of which is tenuous at best. This did not detract from my enjoyment of this book, however. If you take these sections for what they're worth, you can value them as though provoking ideas, instead of any kind of rigid scientific theory.
Overall I loved this book!

Steven Pinker's book makes an attempt to describe "how the mind works." But does he succeed? Pinker does not discuss the mind at length in this book and offers few revoluationary theories on how the mind actually works. Instead, the title serves as a useful way of obtaining the reader's attention, which makes sense. In reality, this book is about evolutionary psychology, why people think the way they do, and the advantages that have accrued to our ancestors for believing and thinking the way they did then -- and the way we continue to this day.

One of the best areas of Pinker's book is his discussion of evolutionary psychology. In that section, Pinker answers a lot of important time-old questions, such as why do we have friends? What is the purpose of war? Why does every culture have religion and marriage? Why do men seem to value virginity in the women they are marrying? Why are parents very protective of their children? Why are brothers and sisters rivals?

Strengths of Pinker's work are his engaging style, his breadth of coverage and his summarizing of much research. Alas (as many reviewers have pointed out), the book has a few flaws.
The most glaring one is the computationalism section. Pinker attempts to defend the notion that brains are computers. While this was orthodoxy in cognitive science and philosophy of mind, it is somewhat less popular these days. This reviewer still thinks the approach has merit, but Pinker does not do justice to this issue.
Nor, realistically, could he - the book is long enough as it is. Arguably, the book could be then done in two volumes: one on computational cognitive psychology, and one on evolutionary psychology, with each drawing on the other volume as needed.
Another issue which is important for popularizations but not for academic volumes is the question of materialism. A perusal of the other reviews shows that materialism offended / turned off many readers. While this is the metaphysical position necessary for scientific research, many members of the public may not realize it and need to be brought up to speed.
This yields another point: Pinker's tome is intended as a popularization - but it does at times flirt with being an academic review, or a textbook. This makes some of it seem a bit unfocused.
Finally: Evolutionary psychology is a bit underdeveloped for the reasons also pointed out by many reviewers - it does not make much contact with neuropsychology. This is unfortunate for the field, but in my view does not detract from Pinker's volume which is summarizing. Taking the book as a monograph would definitely result in this being a limitation.

The brain is arguably the most fascinating thing in existence. For me, it rates right up next to the Uncertainty Principle (in Quantum Physics). The book is all about the mind. It's asks the infamous question, "How can consciousness emerge from the brain" and attempts to answer it. I say 'attempts' because naturally science does not yet know the answer. But Pinker gives a plausible theory. It is not crucial that his theory is correct, for me to want to read the book. It is crucial that the theory makes sense, that it is internally consistent, and that it is intuitive. Whether or not the theory turns out to be correct, it will get you to think about the brain and the mind in a very deep way, and allow you to formulate your theories. I actually used this as a partial introducion to the mind.
I always like to comment on the writing of a book. I would rate this one as above average, but not spectacular. I also did not finish the book. Once I grasped an understanding of the brain, and a lot of the ancillary effects, I began to tire of reading. It became a bit of a struggle. I still rated the book 5 stars, you should notice, and that's because what I read was 5 star material. Maybe one day I'll finish the book.

A good book for many new facts, ideas and theories, but jumpy and without radical new conclusions.

The title of the book is a misnomer. The author frequently gets excited about explaining evolution, whether in organs, thoughts or behaviours. He tries to justify these wanderings by vaguely linking to the mind but if there is any central theme in the book, it is less related to the workings of the mind than justifications of evolutionary theories.

That said, the book's rich details are exciting for anyone with patience and desire to learn. The book does get difficult for non-experts in parts (particularly the section on eye), but the breadth of the topics covered is still fascinating and shows the efforts put in by the author. While the author refrains from taking strong assertive stands (so are minds automatons with all experiences an illusion? something the author tries to support indirectly without taking a firm stand), the author - like most critics - has more fun poking holes in alternate theories including religious or Freudian varieties.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It certainly covered a lot of territory; including computor technology, evolution, art, scientific thinking, society and socialization, etc. Mr. Pinker was able to take even a comparative novice through his arguments regarding human and artificial intelligence, primarily by showing the complexity of the task of creating the "awareness" of human intelligence in the latter (or even of the advisability of it). He also gave a lucid account of why humans think as they do--that is, not always as the scientist might advise--and how this might have arisen evolutionarily. It is not a book to be read quickly, however, especially by the nonprofessional, as it is densely packed with information and requires (and deserves) time to consider it all.

The book spends a lot of time and effort comparing the human brain to a computer system. However, the author makes it clear that the brain is importantly neural and not linear. It is very helpful to look at his theories on how the brain uses experience too come too good answers without using conscious logic. While science may currently or in the future dispute the comparison to a computer system, it helped me develop some understanding of how the brain works. If you don't understand how computers. software, input devices and artificial intelligence works there may be times when you miss the point. This is not a self help book. It is probably not a book you can draw a lot of conclusions from but it does stimulate a lot of possible insights. The book is far too wordy. I want to know the subject not the author. There must be a better book on the subject for the average intelligent reader, but I have not found it.

Steven Pinker is an author of numerous bestseller books, including How the Mind Works. He used to be a professor at MIT in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences department, and he is also a former professor of Stanford University. But, now he is a professor at Harvard University in the Psychology Department where he does research on language and cognition. Pinker has received six honorary doctorates, several teaching awards, and numerous prizes for his seven books. He has been named Humanist of the Year, and is listed in Foreign Policy and Prospect magazine's "The World's Top 100 Public Intellectuals" and in Time magazine's "The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today." Also, he writes for publications such as The New York Times and The New Republic. He is the Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. Some of the prizes he has won for his research are from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the American Psychological Association (APA).
Pinker's book, How the Mind Works, is an interesting book that answers questions on how our minds work they way they do, and what factors are included in that such as evolutionary biology and cognitive science. This book explains how the mind works by explaining what the mind is, how it evolved, and and how it allows us to do daily activities and causes feelings in our day to day lives. From a psychological and scientific point of view Pinker answers questions such as why do we fall in love?, what makes us feel certain feelings such as happiness, sadness, anger disgust?, and how do we see in three dimensions? But, also it explains the difficulties in being able to completely understand the mind, how it works, and why it works the way it does.
One of the main topics covered in How the Mind Works is comparing the functioning of the human brain to the functioning of a computer. Pinker states that there are some similarities between the two. For example, when it comes to recognition the brain does so by firing off action potentials from one neuron to the next and the computer does so by recognizing a pattern in the data, or symbols. Also, the mind and the computer both work towards a goal, which Pinker likes to call intelligence. He notes that intelligence involves specifying a goal, looking at the current situation to see how it is different from the goal's situation, and applying a set of operations that minimize the difference between the two to get one closer to the goal. But, there are things that the brain can do, that Pinker cannot necessarily explain why, that a computer cannot do.
Computers are thought to be more intelligent than humans because they can do things faster and are more accurate; they have excellent precision in the things that they do. One thing the brain can do that a computer cannot is make new connections about something without having to go through the steps as if it were learning about that thing for the first time. This is clear and shown in everyday life when people use synonyms. People learn that enemy and nemesis both mean the same thing, even though they are words that are pronoucned and spelled differently. For example, if one learned that another name for a bear was gaft, then when that person heard gaft he or she would associate all the features of a bear with the word gaft; as opposed to having to learn the features all over again and connect them to the word gaft. Whereas, a computer would have to still go through all of the original steps and learn about the word gaft as a completely new word. The computer would just recognize the shapes of the word (pattern of symbols). Therefore, if the word changed, even though it had the same meaning, the computer would not be able to link the meaning of the word gaft to the meaning, and properities, of the word bear.
The brain can differentiate between two things that are very similar knowing that they are not the exact same thing, where a computer cannot. An example of this is monozygotic twins. The brain can distinguish that they are two different people even though they have the exact same DNA and look exactly alike. A computer would not be able to recognize them as two different people because they have the same makeup/properties/DNA.But, Pinker cannot explain why the brain is able to distinguish them as two different people. So even though computers are thought to be smarter than humans, in reality they do not have as much "common sense" as humans do, and there are things that the brain can do that a computer cannot.
Pinker touches upon how information processing is what really defines intelligence. How information processing occurs is through a scientific process of the firing of signals and codes from one neuron to another. Also, which parts of a neuron are involved and what their job is in delievering and receiving those messages to process information. For example, the dendrite receives the information the axon sends the information off and it travels through the synapse between two neurons. This scientific process leads to his discussion about the computational theory of intelligence.
The computational theory which suggests that intelligence does not occur because of the properties of a system, or the energy flowing through it, but, rather the purpose of the parts of the system and how they are designed to mimic truth-preserving relationships. Looking at probablities of something being true or false and narrowing down the possibilities rather than looking at it as completely true or completely false depicts the computational theory of intelligence. For example, when it comes to recognizing monozygotic twins if a computer was given the DNA and asked, "Is this two different people or the same person?", the computer would automatically say that it is one person because it does not recognize the probablity that it could be monozygotic twins. Whereas, the intelligence due to the properties of the brain, according to computational theory, would allow it to think about the possibility that the information given could be the same information, just of two different people.
The final thing that Pinker talks about is the evolutionary theory. Our minds have evolved through natural selection in order to survive and reproduce by being able to do things such as recognize the color of fruit when it is ripe, remembering where food is being grown or hunted, being able to make tools, recognizing safe plants from toxic ones etc. In the present day, our minds are designed to solve the problems that our ancestors had many years ago. Pinker concludes How the Mind Works by stating that we can never fully comprehend how the mind works because it is not able to solve all the mysteries of life, especially since it is currently designed to solve problems that our ancestors had hundreds of years ago. The mind is capable of many things such as vision, emotion,understanding, intelligence, and information processing. But, it is not perfect, and it is difficult to expect it to understand mysteries and problems of the twenty-first century when it is currently designed to solve problems from centuries ago. Even though the mind can understand many mysteries of the current century and understand things it has not yet evolved to understand, such as technology (computers and cell phones etc.), it is still harsh to expect it to fully understand how the mind works.

There have been over two hundred reader reviews of HOW THE MIND WORKS, published way back in 1997. What I have to say won't add much to the discussion. Nevertheless, here we go! Considering Steven Pinker's arguments in HOW THE MIND WORKS and beginning to comprehend the author's thought processes have certainly been interesting and rewarding challenges. The book got me thinking and challenged me in many new directions. I would recommend this book on these bases alone!

Having said that, I may have discerned more plausible (albeit indirect) claims to truth arising from the fictitious novels of Charles Dickens, which I happen to be reading and re-reading over this same one-year time period (Yes, I've been digesting Pinker SLOWLY!). Dickens doesn't actually "prove" any of his inferences about the human condition, but then again Pinker's so-called "reverse-engineering" of the mind according to the principles of evolutionary and behavioral psychology does not really do much of that either.

Both a strength as well as a possible weakness of this author is his ability to think out loud in ways which the average reader understands. He is brilliant. However, this results in a book which is unnecessarily lengthy (673 pages for the print version-- I plodded through EVERY page) and at times more than a little self-congratulatory. Though rather humble compared to some of the authors he likes to quote, Pinker sometimes can be found in these pages to be preaching to his choir. He at times sets up straw men, and takes unjustified cheap shots at those with whom he disagrees. His casual treatment of a few religious texts is unprofessional for a supposed scientist. What makes these occasional unsupported cheap shots more abhorring is that he rarely supports his own arguments with actual substantiated data. Though extremely interesting and a window on the direction of future scientific discovery, there seems to be lack of solid evidence and support for many of the enticing (and seemingly in line with common sense) ideas about love, family, taking care of siblings-- even the basic assertation that the mind is a computational machine. Other ideas are just old rehashes. In conclusion, however, let me reiterate that this is still a book which will challenge your thinking. Keep working through it.

This is one of the most fun and interesting books ever. It's very informative too, even if the science may be a bit speculative at times. Where the science is weak, Pinker fills in with incredibly thoughtful good sense. Yeah, the title is a bit overblown, perhaps even illogical, but that's part of the fun. Why give a book a boring or wimpy title? I've seen Steven Pinker in person and he is a genius. I sleep through most lectures, but not his. He's a scientist, humorist, satirist, and an incredibly astute observer of humans and human society. He could be our Mark Twain, though with a very subtle sense of humor. He seizes the high ground and gives you the whole picture from there rather than boring you with pointless details. This is a long book full of details too, but he keeps it to the relevant ones.

This book has three main problems. The first is organization - it is in need of some serious editing. I wasn't really expecting to agree with Pinker scientifically, but since "The Blank Slate" was so well written I was at least expecting a well-presented argument. However it comes across as Pinker just floating from one "isn't that neat" topic to the next. Really, 20 pages on stereograms? A second, more important, problem is that the book never really lays out a coherent view of the mind. Apparently the mind is just that thing that runs on the brain, and the brain is complicated because it is the byproduct of natural selection, so Pinker doesn't really try to find unifying principles. To the extent that there is a particular point of view defended it is "the computational theory of mind", but really few scientists doubt such a position. It is when faced with the question of how the mind computes that Pinker fails to lay out a coherent vision. This leads to the final problem - the views presented in this book are somewhat archaic, and it reads like a decent overview of cognitive science circa 1990 (the book was published in 1997). While Pinker mentions important developments like Bayesian inference in passing, he seems forever wedded to good-old fashioned symbolic cognitive science. He justifies this in Ch. 2 with an argument from ignorance - because he can't see how to design neural networks in certain ways, it means connectionism has inherent limitations. Well, it doesn't - the brain is inherently connectionist, and recently work on deep machine learning techniques provides a far better model of the mind than the old guard symbolic cog-sci ever presented. It is interesting that Jerry Fodor, who you might expect to agree with Pinker's overall view, came out sharply critical of this book, arguing that cognitive science wasn't even close to an understanding of the mind. He's right. However, by embracing probabilistic inference and connectionism, computational neuroscience and machine learning have gone much further.

While I wouldn't usually fault a book simply for age, the title of this book implies far more than is delivered. You might want to read this book if you're looking for a decent overview of what cognitive science and psychology were like twenty years ago, but you'll probably be disappointed if you're wondering "how the mind works."

To a general reader with no background in neuroscience, I recommend this book as an excellent jumping-off point. Pinker's model of the mind is intuitively appealing, but more importantly, is backed up by exhaustive references. His style is also excellent.
Many of the conclusions presented by Pinker are un-PC and therefore sure to draw fire. He presents strong evidence that Piaget was a Lamarkian, and asserts that the lack of success associated with constructivist learing (Whole Language, "New-New Math") is nothing more than the inevitable result of wrong theory. Be suspicious of those who slam-dunk the work; read Pinker, check out some of the alternative theories, and draw your own conclusions.

From Pluralities, by Eugenie A. Nida

We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes;
But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes.
Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese;
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.

You may find a lone mouse or a whole lot of mice,
But the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?

Words and Rules, by Steven Pinker, is an engaging and whimsical romp through the verdant fields of linguistics.

The book begins with the modest goal of decoding the human brain, as it pertains to language. It then proceeds, through the most delightful of examples- including verbal illustrations by Dr. Seuss- to pick the language we hold so dear to bits.

Steven Pinker's main premise- which, through the book, continues to hold- is that the workings of both language and the brain can both be discovered by seeing the negative space around them, as it were. By finding the patterns in irregular verbs and nouns, the rules that they defy begin to come to light.

This may sound like a scenic trip through The Doldrums to the average reader, but it is in reality a charming and easily understood foray into the wilds of linguistics. If you know what a verb is and you know what a noun is, you're ready to start learning about the rest of the lot.

Pinker turns boxes and oxen, gone and went, the amazingly varied conjugation of is, and other disparaged treasures of English into the beams of a hundred searching flashlights, which he then shines on the rest of language. He feels absolutely no compunction about positing a theory in one chapter, only to gleefully disprove it in the next, and the result is a winding foray through foreign lands and familiar, and through the many succeeding generations of English. Shakespeare and modern slurvian both find a home in his carefully constructed analysis, and he diligently leads the modern reader through each of them, holding their hand as necessary with use of well chosen and familiar examples. While you may begin muttering (or giggling) to yourself as you read, this is one linguistics book that won't leave you in the dust.

This book, chopped into hefty chapters- bring a bookmark- and illuminated by well chosen and varied excerpts that serve as both teachers and examples, will arm you for any linguistic argument that you wish to engage in, and might solve a few of the lamented confusions that proliferate in the English language. A fun read, and good for your brain.

Giggles: Very high, once you get into it.
Factuality: As confirmed as anything else you'll find on the subject; cites several scientific studies.
Difficulty: Medium.

More book reviews every Monday at Tome Rat Reviews: tomerat.blogspot.com

Excellent and thought provoking read. A fountain of knowledge, conjecture and insight into the inner (and not so inner) workings of the human mind and psyche. I found very little that tripped my fallacy meter and a great deal of science mixed with common sense that made this book feel important as well as entertaining to read. There is quite a lot here and I found that at times I had to take time to digest this only a few pages at a time. But I heartily recommend this book to anyone who's curiosity about our inner workins' needs more than pop psychology to fufill it. I have learned much here and it's an entertaining read as well. You may not like all you learn here but you will come away with a much greater understanding of the human condition and your place in it.

How the Mind Works is a very in-depth explanation and description of how and why the mind works and acts as it does. The most crucial part of the book to me, was the distinction between the mind and the brain. This is not a detailed scientific book about the physical brain, but rather about the part of the brain that we use to see, think, choose, and feel. The content of the book is very dense stuff. While there is a ton of content, and it isn't all extremely exciting, the material is very well written and well edited. Because of the length and the complexity of the material, I would recommend this to readers who are very interested in and/or dedicated to the topic. I also recommend you allow yourself a good chunk of time to complete this book (it took me a whole semester)!

I found this disappointing in comparison to "The Language instinct", which for me was a truly mind-changing book. ""How the Mind Works" has lots of interesting ideas and plausible explanations, but I did not find it nearly so convincing or nearly as wide-reaching as the earlier work. Given the value I give to "The Language Instinct", I should probably try reading this again.

I also read Steven Pinker's `the Blank Slate', which had been recommended by a friend who knew of my interest in the brain and brain-mind area. I was also, as many other reviewers here, impressed again by Pinker's prose style. The witty asides are often apropos and lighten what might otherwise be a dry description of the findings of neuroscience. However, though I like his style, I don't always agree with Pinker and in the cases where I perceive him being wrong, this witty and cheeky style can verge on the snide or smarmy. There is nothing like a dismissive, cynical remark to deal with those who do not share your point of view. But it's a cheap shot and not worthy of Pinker, who can be much smarter when it suits him. E.g. he does this in his critique of two writers who he implies are almost heretical in daring to challenge the computational theory of the mind: John Searle and Roger Penrose. His cynical put down of these 2 writers implies that they were foolish and justly criticized by the majority of philosophers who favor the computational theory. However, the majority was not as large as implied by Pinker. There are quite a few philosophers who argued for the ideas of Searle with his Chinese Room thought experiment or Penrose with his application of Gödel's theorem to the non-algorhythmic side of thought. Pinker thinks that Searle was only exploring meanings of the word `understand' with his Chinese Room: my own take there is that on the contrary Searle omitted an aspect that didn't sit well with his conscious-brain/digestion-stomach analogy: what was missing in the room was a light floating round the library corresponding to the qualia of understanding the Chinese queries which the western librarian did not understand. Also, the book, being written in 1998, can be excused for putting so much emphasis on identical twins whose behavior is bizarrely similar. But since the Human Genome Project completed in 2003, we know that there are only 22,000 genes corresponding to about 10 megabytes of data. But this data is scarcely sufficient to specify the complexity of the 200 different types of cell in the body, it's 12 or more physiological subsystems and all the (rough) structure of the brain. That is true even if the non-coding RNA is considered to have a control function Thus it is ludicrous to suggest that genes could be responsible for the remarkable synchronization between separated twins as reported by Pinker. Indeed, Pinker's detested ghost in the machine might be a more reasonable explanation for this synchronization - via non-local mind or telepathy. So maybe a new edition of this book is due where some of these anachronisms are tidied up.

There are some good points about the book: I like his dismissal of the behaviourists: his jokes about their predilection for rats etc. are justified. And though he pushes the computational theory further than he should, and re-hashes some older findings from cognitive psychology, his position, though mechanist, is less extreme than that of Skinner & co. and he acknowledges the 'residual' mystery of subjective consciousness and in this sense is justified to call himself a sort of 'mysterian'. This is more than can be said of Dennett or his ilk.

Other reviewers are apparently more qualified to criticize this book. I'm only making a note about content.
If you've read Pinker's book The Language Instinct and Wright's book The Moral Animal, then you have nothing to gain from this book, except the chapter describing sight. If you are interested in the meaning of life in light of evolution, read The Moral Animal. Pinker has little to say about it, and what he does say he doesn't explain well.
If you are interested in a study of religion in this light read Religion Explained by Boyer or perhaps Darwin's Cathedral by David Wilson. And if you want spirituality in light of all of this, try The Sacred Depths of Nature by Ursula Goodenough.

Just about every facet of the mind is explored in this magnificent book. The mind's eye chapter where the connection between seeing and thinking is made is perhaps the most in-depth chapter. I liked very much the hotheads chapter on emotions explaining its function. Nothing is below Steven Pinker to make his point and there are several references to movies, anecdotes, etc. making this book somewhat of a popularization of cognitive science. This book is a very thorough sweep of all aspects of the mind and the author succeeded in making it enjoyable. I will reread this book for years to come.

Stephen Pinker's "How The Mind Works" attempts to provide a "cohesive picture" of how humans think by presenting "theories that strike [him] as offering a special insight into our [human's] thoughts and feelings, that fit the facts and predict new ones and that are consistent in their content and in their style of explanation" (ix). Unfortunately, his presentation of cognitive theories falls short of the superb treatment of language presented in "The Language Instinct". "How The Mind Works", while it has moments of clarity and occasionally sparkles with the same zest present throughout "The Language Instinct", is too long and disorganized to provide a cohesive picture of cognitive function.
Pinker believes in a heavily computational, modular model of the mind. In other words, he is claiming that there are pieces of our minds which are specialized to perform certain tasks (modular) and that they perform these tasks by calculation (computational). Pinker is also an evolutionary psychologist; he believes that all the components of cognition are a product of evolution. Thus, he claims, one can explain the way our minds work today by examining the environment in which we developed those minds. Our minds are engineered to ensure our body's survival and our genes' propagation. At the same time, he does not subscribe to the theory that we are not responsible for our own behavior. Rather, he is interested in pointing out how our minds work, and how our genetic baggage can influence our decisions and actions.
Pinker's argument for the computational theory of the mind is compelling. His analysis of the evolutionary economics of the modular brain is particularly intriguing. He shows that the easiest way to accomplish a complex task is to divide it up into several simple modules, which are somehow co-ordinated to achieve the end-goal. It is not feasible to have modules which are so highly specialized that they are too expensive to use. R! ather, it is "cheaper" to have low level tools which can be used to accomplish multiple complex tasks.
Pinker also illustrates how evolution could have shaped even the most complex of cognitive functions. Opponents of cognitive evolutionary theory argue that partial organs would hardly benefit an organism, so all evolutionary advances must have been accomplished via large random mutations. Pinker refutes this claim, mostly with his compelling description of how, in a computer simulation, an eye remarkably similar to a fish's evolved out of a couple of photosensitive cells in just 400,000 generations (164). The cells in question were allowed to undergo small, undirected mutations in size, thickness and refractive index.
At the beginning of "How The Mind Works", Pinker carefully points out that his book "is about how the mind works, not about why some people's minds may work a bit better in certain ways than other people's minds" (34). This sets the stage for his discussion of how the human mind works on average, or how the (hypothetical) average human's mind works. In "Hotheads" and "Family Values" (Chapters 6 & 7), however, he describes individuals making decisions. He describes how emotional and sexual urges help to shape decisions that people make on a personal level, while ignoring specific circumstances which should influence an intelligent individual using his/her computational mind to the fullest.
For example, he argues that raiding other tribes for wealth and wives would benefit the men involved, even if some of them died. This, he claims, is why women never engage in war - "their reproductive success is rarely limited by the available number of males" (515). His claim rests on the premise that each individual derives benefit from a successful raid, except for the poor sucker who dies, and he illustrates this with the use of individual behavior. However, he disregards all of the other information which could be relevant, ! such as whether or not you are physically imposing, already have as many wives as you can support, cannot run as fast as your counterparts. In short, he argues for the individual case, but assumes that all individuals are average.
The problem with this line of thought is that Pinker is no longer explaining how we as a species tend to behave on average or describing which behavior patterns have been most successful and hence are more prevalent today. Rather, he is claiming that genes influence an individual's decisions. This is in direct contrast to his comment in Chapter 1 that if his genes don't like his behavior, they can go jump in a lake.
Pinker also suggests that the reason young men, and especially poor young men, tend to live dangerously is because their genes somehow know that they don't have much chance of surviving to full maturity. Hence, they should get all the thrills they can, sow their wild oats and die happy, perhaps even with descendants from all that casual sex. Is he suggesting that if they do manage to reach maturity, their genes will somehow mutate into stable stay-at-home genes which will then prompt them to be contented with a middle-aged wife and 2.5 kids? Pinker's argument falls flat. In his obsession with evolutionary psychology, he fails to give the environment enough credit for the influence it has on human behavior.
How The Mind Works is as much or more about the influence of evolutionary psychology on human cognition as it is a review of theories of cognition. For amusement and readability (as well as an amazing stock of controversial party topics!), I recommend "Hotheads" and "Family Values", although it is in these chapters that the most serious weaknesses in Pinker's argument are revealed. For the reader who wants an overview of evolutionary psychology and a description of the computational, modular theory of mind, I recommend "Thinking Machines", "Revenge of the Nerds" and "The Mind's Eye". Keep this book on! your coffee table and delve into it sporadically; small doses of Pinker are both amusing and enlightening.

How the mind works or say better 'Digging Minds' - the author reveals the research on Minds and his survey is all 'Ahs' and 'Oops' coz as we read the book, Steven Pinker is cheering thru the chapters on Human brain. His arguments are quite unique esp. the Love chapter is all a 'ga-ga emotional swings' The powerful emotions override circumstances with ease and a glad heart is resourceful in finding joys! Mind itself is a 'Thought Factory' and it can make a heaven or hell out of it. The author digs into psychology - neuroscience effects and how the senses perform. With indepth views, the book might seem misleading at places but to sum up, the authors leaves room for the'free' flow of thoughts. Signs of anxiety, fear, insecurity is emotional outbursts seen in some people which is totally controlled by the thinking process of the brain. Hearing, speaking, thinking are all mind triggered emotions and even memories relate to Mindful thoughts. The book is a good read on Mind functioning and if one is interested in Psychology reads, this is good Pick!

How does a bicycle work? Perhaps that's too complicated since it needs a rider to be in a state of working. Then, how does a windmill work? Yes it needs wind, but let's take the wind for granted here. Also, let's lay aside the knowledge there are different types of windmills all designed by different people. Let's assume we know one when we see one. So how does it work? We are immediately confronted by style and method and purpose. There are many ways to describe the workings of a windmill. Is any one enough? Are all descriptions necessary for truth? And what do we mean by "work" anyway?

If thinking about a relatively simple mechanical device raises so many questions, how many more are raised by thinking about the thinking thing itself - the mind? Why does thinking about how the mind works make predicting the lottery each week seem plausible? Why is "mind" so hard to pin down?

Kudos to Steven Pinker for taking this on in such a pleasurable, readable, thought provoking way. As he says in the preface, this account is a bird's eye view of how the mind works, a survey, It is both for the specialist and the thoughtful layperson.

As a survey the book is broad but the access to it is specific, Mr. Pinker says, "...the mind is a system of organs of computation designed by natural selection to solve the problems faced by our evolutionary ancestors..." He then elaborates adroitly for the next 565 pages. This book is engaging and thought provoking. I recommend it to you. Since you read this far in a review, I am sure the book itself will be of interest to you.

I wrote much marginalia in my copy of this book, often taking a different position and questioning assumptions. My one outstanding argument with Mr. Pinker comes from a statement he makes near the end of the book, "Psychologists and neuroscientists don't study their own minds; they study someone else's." In the margin I wrote, "Too bad, they should." By this I meant that eastern traditions of contemplation, reflection, and meditation provide tools for studying the mind. These tools would be a welcome addition to western science.

Halfway the pragmatic lucidity of Albert Camus ("Le Mythe de Sisyphe", Gallimard, Paris,19510 and the skeptic quietism of Emil Cioran (who wrote the impressive handbook of anti-psychotherapy:"Précis de Décomposition", Gallimard, Paris, 1949), some promising signs of renewal, if not of a real revolution in the field of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis begin to sprout. That's the Evolutionary Psychology, resuming the first and misread books on "Sociobiology"by E.O.Wilson to re-produce them in a more accessible language for a non-academic public, introducing its researches and hypotheses in a sound, clear and good-humored way. Among the leading authors of this brand new stream of thought, some of them have already written several books that in a few years became classics. That's the case, for instance, of Dawkins, R. ("The Selfish Gene", "The Extended Phenotype"and "The Blind Watchmaker"); Wright, R.("The Moral Animal"): the very Wilson, E.O.("Consilience"), and Pinker, S. ("The Language of Instinct"), not to mention dozens of others. The sociologist Philip Rieff's pessimistic concerns about the future of a culture that would be once more, and perhaps definetely dying (Rieff, P.: "Fellow Teachers: of Culture and its Second Death") begin to seem less unavoidable than at the time he has written down his discontents. As a major instance of these hopes, let's take the recently released "How the Mind Works", by Steven Pinker, Norton, New York, 1997. This scholar is professor of Psychology and director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachussets Institute of Technology. He proposes and realizes in his book an extensive revision of the theories about the funcionning of the mind; departing from a most original thesis, that of "reverse engineering", he tries (successfully) to understand the manner how was built and functions the engine(the mind) by learning from i! nferences drawn out of the observations of its products(emotions, actitudes, drives, morals, arts and more), keeping as background and reference the computational theory of the functionning of the brain. Bloom,H. and Rosenberg, D. had already in "The Book of J" skimmed off the sacred from the bible, to approach its literary text plainly; now Pinker, S. starts to skip the divinity of science by the plain research on the physical, accessible structure os its creator, the mind, so that very few room is left for pseudo-prophets, like C.G.Jung and W.Reich, and their religions in disguise pretending to be psychology. More and more we move towards the assertions by Albert Camus that we ought to imagine a brave happy Sisyphus, who defies the gods that imposed him the absurd penalty of a senseless living, by living it in defiant human happiness.

It seems from reading over the reviews that your response to this book depends heavily on who you are and what your background is. I'm not a scientist, but I have a strong general science education. The book was recommended to me by a neurobiologist friend. I went in looking for a good general overview of the subject matter written by someone with a good prose style, and that's exactly what I got. If you have a general liberal artsy science grounding and want to be pointed at some new lines of inquiry, the book is terrific. I think Pinker does a better job making potentially dry subject matter exciting than just about anyone. Very few of the ideas in the book were completely new to me, but I hadn't encountered them all between two covers before and I very much enjoyed watching Pinker draw connections. It's especially interesting to compare this book to the Selfish Gene, which Pinker refers to quite a bit. Richard Dawkins is more concise and clear, but has such a gratingly obnoxious and condescending authorial voice that I find it distracting. Pinker, on the other hand, is a treat to read; it's like sitting at a table with an old friend. Some scientist friends of mine have complained that Pinker speculates too much for their tastes and tries to overextend his Darwinian ideas. Fair enough, but Pinker is careful to warn the reader when he's speculating and when he's summarizing the results of actual research. I felt like I had room to think critically about his arguments while he was making them. The book is very clear about its intentions and its limitations. If you're looking for a highly focused argument backed up by hard data, this book isn't it (The Language Instinct does that better.) If you're looking for Evolutionary Biology For Dummies, this also isn't it. Think of it more as a big tray with lots of intellectual hors d'oeuvres on it, with the bibliography serving as a guide to restaurants where you can get the full meals. I'm glad I read it and will read it again - even if Pinker is dead wrong in all of his arguments, he's a model prose stylist and very good company as an authorial voice. I'll leave it to the experts to pick over the factual and logical holes in the book; meanwhile I think it's well worth the lay reader's time and effort.

The obections levied against Pinker in other reviews here (that he's "arrogant," etc.) seem to me based on a misunderstanding of Pinker's intended scope. The question Pinker addresses is: How does a mechanism do the mind? Pinker presupposes mechanism, and he assumes that the mechanism is the physical brain rather than an immaterial substance (i.e., a "soul"). He does not purport to argue for these presuppositions and assumptions. And just why should he? Popular metaphysical allegiances notwithstanding, scientific explanation is conventionally naturalistic; no one complains that the effects of angels are given short shrift in stellar dynamics, for instance. That in mind, to say that supernatural aspects must be taken into account in the case of mental dynamics is (without further argument, anyway), special pleading.
As for the book: Pinker does an excellent job of informing one's intuitions about how mental competencies can be captured by mechanical means. Pinker feels, reasonably I think, that showing how such heterogeneous competencies can be mechanically instantiated demystifies the mental, and in turn suggests how the brain actually works.
My only quibble (and probably the main quibble of metaphysical dualists) is that Pinker waits until late in the book to state clearly that his book is not concerned with the classic "hard" problem of contemporary philosophy of mind, that of sentience. He should have stated that right up front.

This book is quite impressive- very well researched, thorough, provocative, and very well written. Pinker has done an admirable job approaching such a massively complex problem. However, I think he's a little thick on the psychology, and thin on the neuroscience. For example, I'm not sure he mentions the word "neurotransmitter". Nonetheless, anyone remotely interested in how the mind works ought to read this book. Avery Z. Conner, author of "Fevers of the Mind".

Having a cognitive scientist as a brother, a lot of the material is a comfortable review of conversations from my past. However, Steven Pinker presents the research and theory in a way that pieces it all together wonderfully. I learned more about the theories of the mind's mechanics and how those theories were researched. Almost twenty years after first publication, there is still more information here than you can absorb from one reading.

This book is great, probably the best work of nonfiction I've ever read. The breadth and depth are astonishing, the clarity is remarkable, the presented facts and theories are relevant and powerful enough to substantially enhance my life. I've read a great number of books about the mind; this is easily the best, the most exciting, greatly surpassing my previous favorite, Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett. I plan to read it again, right away.
This is a sort of textbook of the functions of the mind, but a textbook with all the dreadful boring stuff left out and just the exciting, useful stuff left in. He discusses and illuminates such diverse subjects as stereograms (magic eye pictures), vision in general, art, human relations, music, emotions, religion, sex, humor, philosophy, you name it, it's in there. This is stuff I can use. This is stuff I've been longing to know. There's not that much that's original with the author; rather, it's an overview, a compendium, a synthesis of recent thinking in many fields. Read this book!
It is long (it needs to be), and it does go into more detail than I wanted about a few things (3, actually), but even the "excess" detail proved interesting and worthwhile. The style is very clear and readable, and often funny. The general theory or foundation is cognitive psychology and evolution.
I previously read this author's The Language Instinct, and although I finished it, I didn't find it particularly illuminating or memorable. This book is better.

Pinker's book is comprehensive and challenging to read. The chapter on the 'mind's eye' is difficult to understand and I will return to it many times to grasp some of the many insights it contains. The chapter on 'good ideas' is very useful and informative. This is a book I will return to many times. I suspect that there are not many people that have read the book in it's entirety as it contains many sentences that have to be parsed to understand. But, like anything worthwhile some thought has to be applied to get a return.

Unlike most reviewers, I come to How the Mind Works *after* reading Blank Slate, which is by far the superior work, in what are two very similar themes. This volume could as well be entitled "How the Persona Works" as it delves very little in the science of the mind. This is not an introduction to neuroscience, but rather is much more focused on the psychology of social interaction and knowledge acquisition. I suppose I was hoping for a more structured scientific statement of how the brain is composed chemically, designed genetically, and structured systemically.
In a series of sections, Pinker somewhat dis-connectedly jumps through findings from psychology and brain science to illuminate interesting problems. I found the opening sections - on areas like the mind's eye and how the brain is a thinking machine - far less interesting and compelling.
Pinker describes the brain as a machine that has costs (in tissue, energy, and time) and confers benefits. Knowing where the gold is buried in your neighborhood - and whether it's broadly in the northwest quadrant, or specifically underneath the flowerpot - improves your position because it reduces the physical work required to unearth it. That one bit of information allows 1 man to find the gold which would have taken 100 if the digging was done indiscriminately.
There are some very nice thought experiments in this section:
"What if we took [a brain simulation computer] program and trained a large number of people, say, the population of China, to hold in mind the data and act out the steps? Would there be one gigantic consciousness hovering over China, separate from the consciousness of the billion individuals? If they were implementing the brain state for agonizing pain, would there be some entity that really was in pain, even if every citizen was cheerful and light-hearted?"
Each species evolves to fill an ecological niche based on what's available - and humans have taken the cognitive niche, the utilization of a highly evolved symbolic brain to solve problems, and that enables us to "crack the safe" of other species / food sources. "Humans have the unfair advantage of attacking in this lifetime organisms that can beef up their defenses only in subsequent ones. Many species cannot evolve defenses rapidly enough, even over evolutionary time, to defend themselves against humans." Our cognitive process has evolved to be successful in manipulating this physical world and thus much of our thinking is metaphorical in the sense that we organize our thoughts about intangible things "in love", "full of it", "hold it against me" in the conceptual frameworks of space and force.
So the first half of the book is largely a qualitative assessment of how we process information, analogize, and come to conclusions. Pinker walks through the implications of the limitations of our cognitive abilities (again, I would've liked to see more explanation of those limitations in a scientific framework) and what that means for our ability to know, think, and believe.
My favorite sections were toward the end - Hotheads and Family Values - where the implications for social behavior really are the science at hand. Particularly interesting is the section on how anger and rage may have evolved to improve our ancestors negotiating position - if you look crazy and deranged, perhaps it is simply better to accede to your demands. Or how love - an emotion that you cannot to decide to have, and so cannot decide not to have - provides a more credible form of mate acquisition and pairing than any contract or negotiation.
Replicating creatures will help relatives if the benefit to the relative, multiplied by the probability that a gene is shared, exceeds the cost to the animal, that gene would spread in the population. Nepotism broadly defined, then, is another evolutionary strategy, and a successful one. Genes "try" to spread themselves by wiring animals' brains so the animals love their kin and try to keep warm, fed, and safe.
He cites the work of Trivers, who has worked out how the varying parental investments in an offspring (one ovum, nine months, and default child care provision vs. two minutes and a tablespoon of genes) create gender-based mating strategies.
Pinker is quite tactful in slaying the bugaboos of the politically correct, but does ultimately succinctly: "These kinds of arguments combine bad biology (nature is nice), bad psychology (the mind is created by society), and bad ethics (what people like is good)."
A good book is one which throws off another half-dozen additions to the reading list, and Pinker here has me buying new tomes covering everything from Tom Wolfe's critique of white guilt to the latest analysis of people's economic behavior to a history of fashion.
How the Mind Works is worth a read, and I certainly did enjoy it. Nonetheless, there is very little here that you won't find stated more clearly, forcefully, and comprehensively in The Blank Slate, and I would recommend you read that book first.

Reading through the 550-plus page work, I often got a feeling that the title of the book fails to describe what the book is all about. Instead, a more apt title would have been, 'Why the mind works the way it works?'. Dr. Pinker has devoted a large part of the book explaining how natural selection has shaped our minds, quoting numerous examples/studies to back his assertions. The book does talk about some of the 'how' of the workings of the mind, (eg. in the sections about how our visual apparatus works.), but mostly in the first half, whereafter it is only the 'why' of the workings of the mind. The author is often long-winded, and perhaps in a zeal to be technically accurate and comprehensive, he occasionally tends to drag the discussion to topics that are only of secondary importance to the overall theme.
Read this book if you are interested in finding out how evolutionary psychology attempts to explain many aspects of our day to day behaviour, as that is what according to me the theme of this book is. On that count, I couldn't agree more with the Economist, which notes that the book is 'A fascinating bag of evolutionary insights' (read from the back flap of the book).