So how does the mind works pinker

The answer is that no scientific study of the mind suggests the brain is insufficient to account for it. See also: Mind—body problem and philosophy of mind. See 2 questions about How the Mind Works…. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of How the Mind Works. This morning while swimming I thought of this book. And I thought also of a conversation I had recently with a friend.

We were talking about human consciousness. Swimming is a perfect thing to do when thinking about consciousness.

While sliding along the water we are deprived of many things, in particular of the full powers of our senses. There is very little to hear; smellandtaste are also kept at bay; what we can look at is reduced to a wall and a straight line on the floor of the pool; and the This morning while swimming I thought of this book.

There is very little to hear; smellandtaste are also kept at bay; what we can look at is reduced to a wall and a straight line on the floor of the pool; and the pleasant and refreshing water assuages our touch.

So, even if we stop being ourselves since we are not in our natural medium, we can however only be ourselves. Consciousness runs galore. I actually read this book a while ago, and I did so also some time after I interrupted my studies in neurobiology. I had to stop because of personal reasons. But I remember two things clearly about this book. The first is that It was an excellent summary of what was known about the brain when the book was published, and which I had been studying in more detailed textbooks.

Alas, I have not kept with further advances, but my guess is that it is still a very relevant read today. The study is very well structured as a survey of the various considerations on how the mind works, and it is written in a very engaging style. It is also engaging because it addresses our immediate and commonsensical concerns about how our mind works. Why we forget, how do we recognize faces, what falling in love may entail, what it is to laugh..

The best part was the chapter on vision, may be because to me that is one of the most magical powers of our brain. How it can process what our light detecting organs perceive, and create vision in its rear part is a phenomenon that defies our senses.

Pinker does not deal with language in this book because he devoted another book, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language which I have not read yet.

He designed them to complement each other. The second thing I remember is the conclusion. After examining scientifically the various abilities of the brain, Pinker finally gets to the idea of Consciousness, the most perplexing aspect of the brain. But then he gives up and admits that our human capacities are unable to understand how consciousness has come to be, nor what it is.

He proposes that probably only an entity with higher abilities than those of our brain would be able to look down upon human Consciousness and understand what it is does he mean a god, or a machine, or martians?

Of course, so far he is completely right. No one has, as yet, been able to explain Consciousness satisfactorily, and it has been approached from a myriad of fields. Is Consciousness created or has it evolved?. Is it only in our bodies, and therefore mortal, or can it transmigrate?. What is it anyway? So, the missing star is not because of what Pinker has written in this book but for its title. He does not really explain, fully, what he promises: how our mind works.

In any case, I am going swimming tomorrow again, and my Consciousness is delighted with the idea, even if it does not know what it-self is. View all 22 comments. Jul 19, Mikael Lind rated it it was ok Shelves: cognitive-science. The book does not lack good qualities, but I generally dislike the technique of argumentation that is too often characterized by poor proof backed by a certain arrogance towards alternative explanations. The chapter on the sexes is particularly shoddily presented.

That these students are also caught up in a social reality doesn't seem to have crossed Pinker's mind. Good scholars know where to draw the boundaries between science and speculation. Chomsky has said that one can learn more about human nature from reading a novel than from scientific psychology. In other words, he knows that his scientific field is limited to a certain aspect of human nature and language, and thus doesn't try to explain more than can be deducted by reasoning from the facts presented.

One can have opinions as to how successful Chomskyan linguistic science actually is, but that's another matter. Certainly, Pinker is allowed to speculate, as is any scientist. The problem is that Pinker's speculations are sometimes presented as truths.

Therefore, this book does, despite some interesting facts being presented in it, leave me with a bitter taste in my mouth. View all 14 comments. Apr 07, Chrissie rated it did not like it Shelves: philo-psychol , audible , dnf , returned , not-for-me , disliked. I started this, listened to 3. The first chapter 2. This introduction was not concise; it was rambling and consisted of mundane generalizations. It did not clarify how the book would be organized nor in precise terms what the author wished to show.

Nothing enticed me to continue. To better understand the field of cognit I started this, listened to 3.

To better understand the field of cognitive science I am looking for a book based on solid scientific backing, not one based on speculation. I want at least a modicum of solid proof for what is being claimed, and I found not one smidgeon of that here. I disliked the manner in which the author gave an enormous number of examples which supposedly were meant to prove the generalizations made.

Many examples proved nothing. They referred to movie figures, characters in fiction, objects we use in our daily life and further generalizations about human behavior. The list of examples drowned out the statement that was to be proven. Even in the first introductory chapter there were statements made the validity of which can be debated.

That is not true! In the news recently was a debate about the inequitable use of artificial intelligence programs. So I finished the unwieldy, long-winded, empty first introductory chapter and moved on to the second.

Before quitting the book I wanted to check if perhaps the style of writing altered. It did not. The narration by Mel Foster started off too fast, but I got used to it.

Sentences become distorted. In a book such as this a listener needs time to consider what is being said so they can themselves evaluate what they are being told. The rambling, chatty writing style, the multitude of generalizations and the lack of both conclusive evidence and scientific backing are not what I am looking for.

If I do not want to read a book, this says clearly that I did not like that which I read. I am giving this one star. View all 43 comments. Mar 17, David Rubenstein rated it it was amazing Shelves: religion , biology , philosophy , psychology , science. This is a truly comprehensive treatment of the human mind.

Pinker delves deeply into the reasons why the mind has evolved to make decisions in the way it does. There is very little discussion about the biology of the brain; the book points out that a good understanding of the origins of human behavior requires descriptions at a higher level--at the level of the mind, and how it evolved through natural selection. Pinker shows how natural selection has worked its way into every nook and cranny of This is a truly comprehensive treatment of the human mind.

Pinker shows how natural selection has worked its way into every nook and cranny of the mind Every chapter goes into great detail about how our belief system developed, our vision, our reasoning abilities, our family structures, and our emotions.

Pinker describes how our minds are similar to computers and neural networks, and how they are different. I've read other books by Pinker, and they are all great. Highly recommended to every human with a mind! View 1 comment. Aug 21, Joshua Nomen-Mutatio rated it it was amazing Shelves: evolutionary-theory , neuroscience , cognitive-science-and-or-psychology. Slight background story: I was having a discussion with a guy on goodreads.

To put it bluntly: our genes are selfish, but we are not not necessarily, unconditionally so at least. You are not a gene, nor am I. Contrary to popular belief, the gene-centered theory of evolution does not imply that the point of all human striving is to spread our genes. With the exception of the fertility doctor who artificially inseminated patients with his own semen, the donor to the sperm bank for Nobel Prize winners, and other kooks, no human being or animal strives to spread his or her genes.

Dawkins explained the theory in a book called The Selfish Gene , and the metaphor was chosen carefully. They do it by the way they build our brains. By making us enjoy life, health, sex, friends, and children, the gene buys a lottery ticket for representation in the next generation, with odds that were favorable in the environment in which we evolved. Our goals are subgoals of the ultimate goal of the genes, replicating themselves. But the two are different.

As far as we are concerned, our goals, conscious or unconscious, are not about genes at all, but about health and lovers and children and friends. A reviewer of a book about the evolution of sexuality protests that human adultery, unlike the animal equivalent, cannot be a strategy to spread genes because adulteres take steps to prevent pregancy.

But whose strategy are we talking about? This too is a mix up. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain. Genes are a play with in a play, not the interior monologue of the players. The reader sounds like one of those prototypical 's or 60's educational film narrators. It works pretty well. View all 10 comments.

Sep 29, Josh Hamacher rated it liked it. I finally finished this book. It took me far longer than I care to admit to do so. On at least one occasion I lost interest and put it down for several weeks before coming back to it. I have a hard time putting my finger on exactly why this was the case.

It's not that it's bad - in fact, parts of it are absolutely fascinating. It's certainly not the writing; Pinker is quite good despite a tendency to repeat himself frequently.

I think it boiled down to two things for me, with both of them being I finally finished this book. I think it boiled down to two things for me, with both of them being closely related and maybe even the same : 1. This is a page book with only eight chapters. Each chapter is almost a short book on its own, divided into many sections. While a common theme ties together each chapter the sections are often quite divergent. It was hard to maintain momentum when moving from one section to another that seemed only tangentially related.

The subject is the human mind, providing practically infinite material. I think for anyone there would be parts that are interesting and parts that aren't. Having said that, I still recommend this book. This book was an amazing read! Indeed, he argues that evolution of brains and behaviour stopped in the Stone Age, even though elsewhere he points out that the time that has elapsed since then would be adequate for dramatic changes to both. The evidence for these claims is limited to a couple of overinterpreted anthropological observations and a rhetorical attack on all those who dispute them, a series of straw people variously identified as Marxists and feminists.

In so far as I am familiar with the work of those Pinker derides including my own , his caricatures suggests that he has scarcely read, still less attempted to understand anything we have ever written. We are, evolutionary psychology argues, merely the deterministically driven products of our selfish genes and their sole interest, replication. All our deepest desires and emotions, our abjectly selfish failures, as well as our most selfless ambitions to create a more beautiful world, are simply shadow play.

Yet at times Pinker, like Dawkins and others, recoils from this bleak vision. But where then does this autonomy come from?

Trending Latest Video Free. Will a scramble to mine metals undermine the clean energy revolution? I knew it had little scientific purpose. It was done in an era in which there was no oversight over the treatment of animals in research, and just a few years later it would have been inconceivable. But this painful episode resonated with me for two reasons. One is that it was a historical change in a particular kind of violence that I lived through, namely the increased concern for the welfare of laboratory animals.

This is the famous Milgram experiment, in which people were delivering what they thought were fatal shocks to subjects pretending to be volunteers. I show the film of the Milgram experiment to my class every year.

There was a lot of skepticism that people could possibly behave that way. Prior to the experiment, a number of experts were polled for their prediction as to what percentage of subjects would administer the most severe shock. The average of the predictions was on the order of one-tenth of one percent. The actual result was 70 percent. Q: What would you say is your biggest flaw as a scholar? What about your greatest strength?

I am enough of a psychologist to know that any answer I give would be self-serving. A: I was pressured into becoming a Twitterer when I wrote an op-ed for The New York Times saying that Google is not making us stupid, that electronic media are not ruining the language. You better start tweeting yourself. The majority of my tweets are links to interesting articles, which takes advantage of the breadth of articles that come my way — everything from controversies over correct grammar to trends in genocide.

Having once been a young person myself, I remember the vilification that was hurled at us baby boomers by the older generation. This reminds me that it is a failing of human nature to detest anything that young people do just because older people are not used to it or have trouble learning it.

This simply misunderstands the way that human language works. All of us command a variety of registers and speech styles, which we narrowcast to different forums. We speak differently to our loved ones than we do when we are lecturing, and still differently when we are approaching a stranger.

And so, too, we have a style that is appropriate for texting and instant messaging that does not necessarily infect the way we communicate in other forums. In the heyday of telegraphy, when people paid by the word, they left out the prepositions and articles.

And likewise, the prevalence of texting and tweeting does not mean that people magically lose the ability to communicate in every other conceivable way. Q: Early in your career you wrote a number of important technical works. Do you find it more fun to write the broader appealing books?

A: Both are appealing for different reasons. In trade books I have the length to pursue objections, digressions, and subtleties, something that is hard to do in the confines of a journal article. In the case of my books on language, for example, I used not just laboratory studies of kids learning to talk, or studies of language in patients with brain damage, but also cartoons and jokes where the humor depends on some linguistic subtlety.

Telling examples of linguistic phenomena can be found in both high and low culture: song lyrics, punch lines from stand-up comedy, couplets from Shakespeare. One example is the Old Testament, which narrates one genocide after another, commanded by God.

I also find that there is little distinction between popular writing and cross-disciplinary writing. Academia has become so hyperspecialized that as soon as you write for scholars who are not in your immediate field, the material is as alien to them as it is to a lawyer or a doctor or a high school teacher or a reader of The New York Times. Q: Were you a big reader as a teen? Can you think of one or two works you read early, fiction or nonfiction, where you came away impressed, even inspired, by the ideas, the craft, or both?

A: I was a voracious reader, and then as now, struggled to balance breadth and depth, so my diet was eclectic: newspapers, encyclopedias, a Time-Life book-of-the-month collection on science, magazines including Esquire in its quality-essay days and Commentary in its pre-neocon era , and teen-friendly fiction by Orwell, Vonnegut, Roth, and Salinger the intriguing Glasses, not the tedious Caulfield. Only as a year-old in junior college did I encounter a literary style I consciously wanted to emulate — the wit and clarity of British analytical philosophers like Gilbert Ryle and A.

Q: Might we one day see a Steven Pinker book about horse racing or piano playing — or a Pinker novel? A: Whatever thoughts I might have had of writing a novel were squelched by marrying a real novelist [Rebecca Goldstein] and seeing firsthand the degree of artistry and brainpower that goes into literary fiction.

But I have pondered other crossover projects. A: Foremost is passion for the subject matter. Studies of teaching effectiveness all show that enthusiasm is a major contributor. Also important is an ability to overcome professional narcissism, namely a focus on the methods, buzzwords, and cliques of your academic specialty, rather than a focus on the subject matter, the actual content.

Psychology is an academic guild, and I could certainly spend a lot of time talking about schools of psychology, the history of psychology, methods in psychology, theories in psychology, and so on. But that would be about my clique, how my buddies and I spend our days, how I earn my paycheck, what peer group I want to impress.

What students are interested in is not an academic field but a set of phenomena in the world — in this case the workings of the human mind. Sometimes academics seem not to appreciate the difference. That is a lifelong challenge. Often an idea in one of my books will have originated from the classroom, or vice versa, because the audience is the same: smart people who are intellectually curious enough to have bought the book or signed up for the course but who are just not as knowledgeable about a particular topic as I am.

Another important solution is being prepared to revise. Most of the work of writing is in the revising. To simultaneously concentrate on the form, on the felicity of expression, is too much for our thimble-sized minds to handle.

You have to break it into two distinct stages: Come up with the ideas, and polish the prose. This may sound banal, but I find that it comes as a revelation to people who ask about my writing process.

A: What a dangerous question! This is a well-documented psychological phenomenon. Every generation thinks that the younger generation is dissolute, lazy, ignorant, and illiterate. There is a paper trail of professors complaining about the declining quality of their students that goes back at least years. All this means that your question is one that people should think twice before answering. I know a lot more now than I did when I was a student, and thanks to the curse of knowledge, I may not realize that I have acquired most of it during the decades that have elapsed since I was a student.

It was better when I was at that age, a time when I and other teenagers spoke in fluent paragraphs, and we effortlessly held forth on the foundations of Western civilization. Here is a famous experiment. A 3-year-old comes into the lab. He opens up the box and instead of finding candy he finds a tangle of ribbons.