Rating: 
Summary: At least we know how Pinker's mind works!
Review: I still don't know how MY mind works, but I don't care: It works and the more I read by Pinker, the more I think I know how HIS mind works! Delightful!
Gisela Gasper Fitzgerald, author of ADOPTION: An Open, Semi-Open or Closed Practice?
Rating:
Summary: Pinker does it again
Review: WHy this book doesn't average more stars than it does is beyond me. I image it is because it occasionally ruffles ideological feathers. This is a wonderful book that goes a long way toward introducing lay readers and interested scholars to the rich and developing field of evolutionary psychology. Pinker is one of the great writers in the science popularization field. His books are well researched, his points are well argued, and the tone quite respectful. Well maybe he is a little rough on the postmodernists, and the hard cultural relativists, but they probably deserve a little harsh criticism.
Anyone interested in the state of cognitive research today ought read this book. Agree with him or not, Pinker will not dissappoint.
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Summary: Pinker is a genius
Review: With good form, good argument and good humor, Mr. Pinker again has explained the complex facets of the human mind in a way that is clearly understood. Thank you, good sir.
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Summary: Another Pinker people pleaser
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Just a small note
Review: 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.
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Summary: An important, but somewhat flawed book.
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Is this really 'How the Mind Works?'
Review: 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).
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Summary: Convincing, but a bit messy
Review: I found the arguments in this book to be generally convincing, and parts of it are a pleasure to read. But the organization is not the best it could be. Some topics are treated primarily in terms of the computational model of the mind, while other topics are dominated by discussion of the Darwinian logic. The book would feel more coherent with a stronger single connecting thread, but perhaps that is too much to ask for a general survey.
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Summary: Not for the mind, but for the evolution content.
Review: 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?
Rating:
Summary: A tough read, but worthwhile...
Review: ...but what else would you expect from a book with a title like that? Pinker has some fine insights into our thought processes, and it got me thinking on many an occasion. However, there did seem to be a few things that he didn't touch upon which I found unsatisfying. Here's one: He spoke of the "language of music", but there is a lower-level discussion to be had; *Why* do we associate low, deep sounds with power, foreboding and fear? *Why* do high, piercing sounds denote energy, movement and alarm? Do these relate to our distant past in the wild, or are there other psycho-acoustic reasons? Couple this book with Robert Wright's "NonZero", and you pretty much have an abbreviated profile of the driving forces behind the mind of the modern human. The mind is an amazing thing.
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