Why do fools fall in love? Why does a man's annual salary, on average, increase £375 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 10-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 marvellously fun, awesomely informative survey of modern brain science. Pinker argues that a combination of Darwin's theories and some 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 at the top of the 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.

2008-01-13 Superficial

Steven Pinker is the author of the modular mind theory which is refuted by his colleagues. Further analogies with computer architecture are similarly presented here with his inference of parallel processing. Other authors stress that the brain's neural networks are more akin to internetworking which does have implications for parallel processing but so what? We know all of this already. Unconvincing on the relationship between mind and brain. For instance, how is will (thought direction) and conscience explained? Thus far, no one has succesfully explained the distinction and scientifically is very unlikely to. This leaves unlimited scope for ongoing speculation, of course. The self is much more than neural networking, which is the platform of the human mind and not the mind itself. The reductionist stance to engineering concepts for the mind is too simple by half. The sheer complexity of the brain and nervous system is ever more impressive than superficial explanation.