How the Mind Works (Paperback)

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.

I have been a researcher in neurophysiology and cognition, and currently am a researcher in artificial intelligence. When I picked up this book to read, I was expecting great things, since Pinker has such a strong "public" reputation. After struggling to find real substance in the book (I read the first 3 chapters and then about 1/3 of each of the remaining chapters), I became curious about what other reviewers had said about it. It was soon clear that there were two camps: those who loved it (five stars) and those who thought it was shallow, misrepresentative, glib, or even pseudo-scientific (1 or 2 stars). Most of those who found it excellent (the vast majority) seemed to be generally unfamiliar with the field, while those who disliked it were usually very familiar with the field.

For the uninitiated or laymen readers, it appears to be a very entertaining and stimulating experience, but I believe it is very unfortunate that the breadth of treatment by Pinker is taken for a great intellectual exercise. On the contrary, he actually says very little of substance about how the mind works, as the informed disappointed reviewers have pointed out. It seems to be mostly a scattered rehashing of old and not particularly illuminating ideas in the field.

I like many other researchers am concerned about conveying the findings in our field to the general public and potential young scholars. But there is a trend in the consumption of science (and knowledge in general) in this society which I find disturbing. We have become consumers of knowledge without serious reflection. We are hooked by books that convey fascinating facts, but little in the way of careful thinking and reasoning, without which these facts have little useful grounding. The result in the case of this book is a long string of "anecdotes" about "what kind of things" minds do without almost no description of how the mind actually works. For those interested in a more meaningful but more intellectually demanding work, I suggest Dennett and some of the other authors cited by previous critical reviewers.

This area is one of the great last frontiers, but one still largely unconquered. Honest researchers would agree that we have only discovered the very tip of the iceberg, and meaningful discoveries are very unlikely to come easily. Any other portrayal does an injustice to this very challenging area.