How the Mind Works
by Steven Pinker
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Book Summary Information
Author: Steven PinkerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-01-01
ISBN: 0393318486
Number of pages: 672
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Product features:
- Sociology, Human Nature, The Mind
Book Reviews of How the Mind Works
Book Review: the meaning of my life
Summary: 5 Stars
To paraphrase from preface's the famous Dr. Noam Chomsky's (a personal hero) suggestion regarding our ignorance, we do not have any idea how this vast mystery called the mind could be solved. I have read this book the year it first came out (1997) and many times over since; should one still belive that thoughts, feelings, beliefs, meanings or ideas that all generated from this wonderful gold mine we called the mind can ever be understood? Dr. Pinker served as a wonderful tour guide to simply and elegantly point out some sailent features and functions of the mind that we ,I mean any non-psychologist, take for granted every day. I use my mind every day. (My wife and co-workers might want to argue otherwise, but they are wrong! I do think on a daily basis.). Yet I don't have any clue on the inner workings inside my own brain. Is the 17 th century French philiospher Rene Descart right when he proclaimed "I think therefore I am?" What insight and understanding have we gain regarding our mind since Descart's time? Another words, do we have any better understanding how thoughts and ideas are generated and processed in our mind? Dr. Pinker, now at Harvard and a gaint in this field, do not have the answers. As a matter of fact, he was not even sure all or any of our current understanding and guesses would later proven to be true. However, he has painted an overall picture on the state-of-art research on cognition. Oh, the book. It has eight chapters with interesting and enticing titles and he tried (I think and hope) to tickle readers' imaginations and challange our mostly unproven assumptions and beliefs. For example, under the standard equipment chapter, rationality and decision making serve as a frame work to discuss the complexity of our mind. He used the working definition of intlliegence (ie the ability to attain goals by assessing obstracles along the way and modify one's action to reach that point) to illustrate that we use our desires (ie the latest big screen Sony TV) and use our beliefs (ie if I work extra 50 hours per week to generate more income) to increase the chance of achieving that result (i.e. watching the Final Four basketball games on SONY big screen TV). Yet is this stimluli (vivid and beautiful live college hoops on TV) and response (working extra hours to generate estimated 5000 dollars of income) due to thinking or is this just a result fo a physical response from a sensory input? Do we endlessly shop for junks we cannot possibly need because of a physcial response of a sensory stimuli and not due to brain activities at all? Perhaps endless charges on credit cards of the mall rats have nothing to do with the minds or intelligence but a mere knee-jerk response to stimuli. What about the molecular/celluar level of the brain? Can we understand how the mind work if we exam and understand how each cell in our brain work and therefore how the mind work? From page 99, Dr. Pinker stated from the mathematicians Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts that neurons have one purpose in life: "add up a set of qualites and compare the sum to a threshold and indicate whether the threshod is exceeded." Are you joking me? With a description like this, it sounded more like a description of a computer than a living breathing cell let alone a functional neuron. Suppose we have a complete and perfect understanding of a neuron on a celluar and molecular level, as he pointed out in the next few pages it is the interconnectiveness (my own invention to summarize the vastly complicated neural networks) that might be more important than any single cell. Another words, perhaps thoghts, ideas, imagination, emotions and other abstraction generated from our mind might be the results of these "supercomputer" networking. This conjucture might be completely wrong but interesting nevertheless. What about complexity itself? Can the fact that we are the product of millions of years of natural selections and therefore the compelexity of any organ in our body including the brain is resulted from million years of fuctional and adapive survival? It is beyond imagination of my limited mind (no pun intended) that perhaps I don't have adequate brain power to understand my mind? So why should I or any one care how my mind think and why my mind think a certain way? A mental life is the result of my mind, and it is utterly unexplainable in most cases. Why certain stimuli upset me to the nth degree and only at certain time and space? Is my mind too limited or incapable of overcoming those undesireable yet almost unaviodable negative feelings? Why can I be peaceful and happy like I want to be every time I am sitting in traffic idle for hours on that big parking lot we called the 210 freeway in Los Angeles? Dr. Pinker has no answers for my agony or a way to relief my mental anguish. He only gave me a clue as to the possible explainations and ideas. I keep this book close to me at an arm's reach every time my mind fails me (more frequent than I like now days and I am only 36 years old) and I re-read it over and over for its shear beauty, audacity, and clarity. Unquestion the authorative guide to my or any one's mind.
Summary of How the Mind Works
"[How the Mind Works] marks out the territory on which the coming century's debate about human nature will be held."?Oliver Morton, The New Yorker
In this extraordinary bestseller, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading cognitive scientists, does for the rest of the mind what he did for language in his 1994 book, The Language Instinct. He explains what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life. And he does it with the wit that prompted Mark Ridley to write in the New York Times Book Review, "No other science writer makes me laugh so much. . . . [Pinker] deserves the superlatives that are lavished on him." The arguments in the book are as bold as its title. Pinker rehabilitates some unfashionable ideas, such as that the mind is a computer and that human nature was shaped by natural selection, and challenges fashionable ones, such as that passionate emotions are irrational, that parents socialize their children, and that nature is good and modern society corrupting. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize A New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1997 Featured in Time magazine, the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Nature, Science, Lingua Franca, and Science Times Front-page reviews in the Washington Post Book World, the Boston Globe Book Section, and the San Diego Union Book Review IllustrationsWhy do fools fall in love? Why does a man's annual salary, on average, increase $600 with each inch of his height? When a crack dealer guns down a rival, how is he just like Alexander Hamilton, whose face is on the ten-dollar bill? How do optical illusions function as windows on the human soul? Cheerful, cheeky, occasionally outrageous MIT psychologist Steven Pinker answers all of the above and more in his marvelously fun, awesomely informative survey of modern brain science. Pinker argues that Darwin plus canny computer programs are the key to understanding ourselves--but he also throws in apt references to Star Trek, Star Wars, The Far Side, history, literature, W. C. Fields, Mozart, Marilyn Monroe, surrealism, experimental psychology, and Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty and his 888 children. If How the Mind Works were a rock show, tickets would be scalped for $100. This book deserved its spot as Number One on bestseller lists. It belongs on a short shelf alongside such classics as Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, by Daniel C. Dennett, and The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, by Robert Wright. Pinker's startling ideas pop out as dramatically as those hidden pictures in a Magic Eye 3D stereogram poster, which he also explains in brilliantly lucid prose.
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