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How the Mind Works

by Steven Pinker

3.99 · rating details · 2,411 ratings · 149 reviews

“A model of scientific writing: erudite, witty, and clear.” —New York Review of Books

The Pulitzer Prize finalist and national bestseller How the Mind Works is a fascinating, provocative work exploring the mysteries of human thought and behavior. How do we see in three dimensions? How do we remember names and faces? How is it, indeed, that we ponder th...more

Paperback, 661 pages

Published June 22nd 2009 by W. W. Norton & Company (first published 1997)

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May 16, 2009

Joshua Nomen-Mutatio rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: cognitive-science-and-or-psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary-theory

I think this a great way of addressing a widespread misunderstanding about genetics, biological evolution and human thought & behavior.

Slight background story: I was having a discussion with a guy on goodreads.com within his comments on his review of Why I Am Not A Muslim and eventually it came to this:

Myself: "It’s a categorical mistake to think this about biological evolution. To put it bluntly: our genes are selfish, but we are not (not necessarily, unconditionall...more

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Feb 05, 2008

Rita T rated it

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Recommends it for: anyone who isn't a rabid Foucault acolyte

I read all bio-determinist arguments, no matter how sound their science, as a mandate to return to the 50's - those halcyon days when men schnoockered their secretaries while women bought canned foods and tended the young. Nonetheless, I loved this book. The early chapters, especially on the computational theory of mind, are incredible. Pinker is just unbelievably detailed and the linguistic spin he brings to the discussion of cognitive development is a great dimension. The later chapters are ...more

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Dec 08, 2008

Becky rated it

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Very interesting, well-written, and comprehensive. I appreciated the overview of both computational and evolutionary psychology in one tome of a book; computational psychology is pretty much awesome, and though I must confess that I skipped some of the technical examples in an effort to prevent my brain from breaking, Pinker's writing was for the most part clear and explanatory. I learned a lot!

I would be interested to find out whether any of the specific evolutionary theories have b...moreVery interesting, well-written, and comprehensive. I appreciated the overview of both computational and evolutionary psychology in one tome of a book; computational psychology is pretty much awesome, and though I must confess that I skipped some of the technical examples in an effort to prevent my brain from breaking, Pinker's writing was for the most part clear and explanatory. I learned a lot!

I would be interested to find out whether any of the specific evolutionary theories have become passe over the last ten years, since a great deal of new research must have come out since then. A second edition would be great if necessary.

I still have reservations about the conclusion of the book. Basically, Pinker says that the computational view of the mind means that consciousness - the ability of the mind to actually experience stimulus and thought, like the taste of a strawberry or the redness of red - has no apparent function. People could go through the complex computational steps of mental activity without experiencing any of it. There is no way to prove that the person sitting next to you is not a "philosophical zombie," who acts like they think and feel but is really just a mechanical thing.

Not only does this mean I have no solid proof that all of you aren't just automatons, but no can explain why we experience things to begin with! Very perverse philosophers have attempted to argue that experience is an illusion, but of course this makes very little sense. Pinker is forced to conclude that our brains are just not smart enough to solve a peculiar problem like the nature of consciousness and self, along with some other potential philosophical problems like the possibility of absolute morality or the ability of language to refer to real things (don't understand the problem with this last one myself.)

I'm not saying that I can prove Pinker is absolutely wrong in this conclusion, but it is deeply unsatisfying. Our minds are, apparently, the product of a lawful universe. Logic is able to tackle, if not solve, every other problem with which we have been presented, from pulsars to microorganisms. The only exception is strange, peripheral problem of where the universe came from to begin with. Why should our minds be another such exception? If we can't explain our minds as a logical evolutionary adaptation, doesn't that call into question evolutionary psychology as a theory? How could human awareness not be the product of evolution (the ultimate logical process)?

Pinker tries to compare our failure to understand the mind to an autistic person's failure to understand the existence of other minds or a dog's colorblindness. But the problem with an autistic person, as I understand it, is not that they can't have the existence of other minds explained to them, but that they don't intuitively act as if they exist. Similarly, if the dog were more intelligent, they could obviously believe in and understand what color is, they just can't imagine what it is to see it. If we were blind to the nature of how sentience interacts with the rest of the universe, we should not realize that we have this blindness until it is explained to us. As it is, we are aware of a blindness and can't think of how to see what we know we know must be out there to be seen.

Finally, if Pinker is right that science has failed us regarding the problem of human consciousness, it's rather questionable for him to argue that religious or mystical explanations are out of the question, because if that were so, it wouldn't be an unsolvable problem after all. Either the logical forces of the universe to which we are all accustomed are responsible for consciousness, or Something Else is. Pinker is right; it would be presumptuous and unscientific to call the Something Else God or Divine Energies or what have you. But we cannot discount these hypotheses outright, and the notion that our consciousnesses apparently work apart from the causation that is evolution at least means that the universe is a much stranger place than we have been led to believe. Really I would rather believe that my mind is the result of scientifically knowable causes, I like science, but if I am to believe Pinker, then another, very weird solution is out there.

Very interesting read, but the ultimate difficulties brought up by the theories are much more frustrating than the elegant solutions they provide! Mostly I just don't like giving up on a scientific solution to a problem; it seems wrong.(less)

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Dec 23, 2009

Nicholas Whyte added it · review of another edition

"http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1289334.html[return][return]I was really disappointed by this book. Pinker starts out by claiming that he will explain the origins of human emotions, aesthetics, and belief in the context of the latest findings of evolutionary and psychological research. He does not really succeed in doing so. It is a succession of moderately interesting research reports, linked together with a glue of neat one-liners (mostly other people's), but without really coming to a kil...more

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Jan 09, 2012

Ryan Erwin rated it

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Very interesting. 20-30 years from now, I think most people will understand that there's nothing "magical" about the "mind", the "soul", religion, art, men, women, or any of the other sacred cows that continue to hold back humans from understanding themselves.

How the Mind Works was published back in 1997, but I didn't encounter any of the points that Pinker made in High School or Collage, up until 2000. Pinker focuses on a "computational theory of min...moreVery interesting. 20-30 years from now, I think most people will understand that there's nothing "magical" about the "mind", the "soul", religion, art, men, women, or any of the other sacred cows that continue to hold back humans from understanding themselves.

How the Mind Works was published back in 1997, but I didn't encounter any of the points that Pinker made in High School or Collage, up until 2000. Pinker focuses on a "computational theory of mind", saying that the mind is a complex parallel information processing system.

Of course Pinker doesn't have the "final word" on How the Mind Works, but he provides more evidence, more insight, and more rationality than the "romantics" and their leaders Freud Sigmund 1856-1939 Sigmund and Carl Jung.

Pinker continues on many of the themes here in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.

Unfortunately for Americans, Political Correctness seems to be a barrier to accurately seeing human nature, as human nature necessarily is different for different groups of people, particularly for men and women.

My favorite anecdote is about the "Coolidge effect":

… an old joke about Calvin Coolidge when he was President … The President and Mrs. Coolidge were being shown [separately] around an experimental government farm. When [Mrs. Coolidge] came to the chicken yard she noticed that a rooster was mating very frequently. She asked the attendant how often that happened and was told, “Dozens of times each day.” Mrs. Coolidge said, “Tell that to the President when he comes by.” Upon being told, President asked, “Same hen every time?” The reply was, “Oh, no, Mr. President, a different hen every time.” President: “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.”

Pinker explains the mind by "reverse-engineering" it—figuring out what natural selection designed it to accomplish in the environment in which we evolved. The mind, he writes, is a system of "organs of computation" that allowed our ancestors to understand and outsmart objects, animals, plants, and each other.

How the Mind Works explains many of the imponderables of everyday life. Why does a face look more attractive with makeup? How do "Magic-Eye" 3-D stereograms work? Why do we feel that a run of heads makes the coin more likely to land tails? Why is the thought of eating worms disgusting? Why do men challenge each other to duels and murder their ex-wives? Why are children bratty? Why do fools fall in love? Why are we soothed by paintings and music? And why do puzzles like the self, free will, and consciousness leave us dizzy?

This arguments in the book are as bold as its title. Pinker rehabilitates unfashionable ideas, such as that the mind is a computer and that human nature was shaped by natural selection. And he challenges fashionable ones, such as that passionate emotions are irrational, that parents socialize their children, that creativity springs from the unconscious, that nature is good and modern society corrupting, and that art and religion are expressions of our higher spiritual yearnings. (less)

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Aug 24, 2011

Ianw19 rated it

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How the Mind Works is a dazzling intellectual tour de force that masterfully integrates insights from evolutionary biology, computer science, experimental psychology, anthropology, economics, and the humanities to provide the reader with a mind-blowing crash course in human nature. I'd imagine that this book will inspire many students and other intellectually-inclined people to get involved in psychology/cognitive science. It's unrelentingly thought-provoking and often very very funny.

...more

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Jul 19, 2011

Mikael Lind rated it

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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. The "proof" that Pinker refers to when trying to back his claims that (simply put) evolution and innateness alone explain the differences between the sexes when it comes to attitudes to sex (the male hunter/gatherer has logic...more

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Apr 06, 2011

Mirek Kukla rated it

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Shelves: science-and-philosophy

'How the Mind Works' is an ambitious book. Pinker addresses an insane medley of topics: if it pertains to the mind in any way whatsoever, it's fair game. This variety of topics discussed is the books greatest strength, but also it primary weakness.

Firstly, the bad: this book isn't clearly connected by an overarching thesis. I suppose everything has to do with 'the mind' - though this is debatable, as there are long stretches where you'll be prone to forget this book is supposed to be...more

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Dec 21, 2008

Erik rated it

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Another Stephen, the late Stephen Jay Gould, is the hero of this book for me. Gould pointed out long ago that evolutionary explanations for human behavior are riddled with errors. We observe a certain behavior, then we tell a just-so story to explain how this behavior would have benefited our ancestors in the past and helped them to survive and pass on their genes. Sounds good and 'scientific' at first. The problem is that even if this is right, it isn't proof just to tell a story--you have to d...moreAnother Stephen, the late Stephen Jay Gould, is the hero of this book for me. Gould pointed out long ago that evolutionary explanations for human behavior are riddled with errors. We observe a certain behavior, then we tell a just-so story to explain how this behavior would have benefited our ancestors in the past and helped them to survive and pass on their genes. Sounds good and 'scientific' at first. The problem is that even if this is right, it isn't proof just to tell a story--you have to do the hard work to find the evidence that it really was that way and not some other. This critique was originally made by an engineer named Fleming in a review of Darwin himself. You can tell infinitely many, many evolutionary stories and the whole thing becomes unverifiable junk science instead of real science with a testable hypothesis. Evolution is full of surprises that have been evolved for one reason but have ended up serving a different function than what they were evolved for. It is not as simple as reverse engineering a design, for example if the lineage back zigs and zags instead of being a steadily evolving apparatus. Behavior being malleable, infinitely complex functionally, and probably serving several different competing strategies at once, cannot be analogized to the eye or the liver it seems to me. So these are interesting stories, but are very reductionistic and "straight-line" rather than what I think is the jagged mutually determining path of evolution, culture and environment, all together. Also, like Freud, Pinker goes for the lowest common denominator type of explanation because it sounds more 'real life' but probably is too reductionistic for a thing as complex as human nature. The humanities (which he makes light of) do a much much better job of exploring the richness of human experience which goes hand in hand with evolution--the real theory of evolution. Pinker uses junk science to justify his own cultural philistinism. So: thumbs down. He is not really interested in the hard work of backing up any of these 'just so' stories with proof, unless 'opinion polls' cited throughout the book are considered 'proof' of anything (????). Nor are many of the experiments he cites which could bear a few interpretations of their own. He is more interested in having a lowbrow pop-culture debate grinding an axe against feminists (why?) or knocking down strawmen proponents of a blank slate conception of human nature no one ever seriously held.(less)

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Oct 03, 2010

Josh Hamacher rated it

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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, ...more

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Apr 02, 2010

Rafael Bechelli rated it

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This book first chapters were very easy and nice to go through, but there are a few chapter somewhere in the first half of the book that were not so interesting to me. I don't know exactly what happened but getting through these few chapters took me months. Then the book became once again pleasant and inteligible and went like this to the end.

My highlights are on:

A few pages dedicated on how mathematical concepts and thoughts are processed in our brains.

The di...more

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Sep 11, 2010

Kevin Hickey rated it

· review of another edition

As the title suggests, this is a book of immensely broad scope and ambition, seeking to articulate a broad theory of how the human brain is structured and operates. Along the way, Pinker surveys a number of developments in cognitive science and human evolutionary biology over the past few decades. Topics include how "sight" works (i.e., how the brain interprets the information in a retinal image), the interaction between natural language and the logic of thought, intuitive physics an...more

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Jan 30, 2009

Alex Csicsek rated it

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This is an interesting book that - as those who skip the title page may be surprised to learn - describes to us laymen how the mind works. Pinker uses an evolutionary framework to explain not only the functions of the brain but the reasoning for why it works in the way it does. Topics range from the physical to the intellectual to the emotional activities of the brain, although I thought he didn't do a great job exploring the links between each.

Evolutionary psychology has much to tea...more

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Oct 30, 2009

Mike rated it

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This is really a great book. I've been a fan of Steven Pinker's since the "The Blank Slate", and he does an amazing job of distilling complicated technical subjects in a way that is easily digestible and interesting to a layperson like myself. The first section of the book, which analyzes how the brain is like a computer, is a bit of a slog. In some ways it was the most interesting for me, however, since everything he dealt with was new and cutting edge. If you get through that part th...more

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Nov 07, 2010

Naxa rated it

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Shelves: psychology, neuorscience-evolution, science, linguistics

I have now read three of Pinkers books and while this one is not the worst, it doesn't do much better than than the worst. His first two books on language which I have read and reviewed here were both more relevant and interesting to me. Though the language instinct was terribly written and argued, so this book has a leg up in that regard.

This book was probably a lot more relevant when it came out. Unfortunately a lot of the information in it is either dated or too basic to be intere...more

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Aug 17, 2009

Glenn rated it

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Shelves: math-and-science

I have copies of the five mainstream books that Steven Pinker has released and am slowly working my way through them. He is one of the world's leading cognitive scientists and is a professor at MIT. I really enjoyed his first book "The Language Instinct", so was looking forward to reading his second "How The Mind Works". I didn't enjoy this one as much - at times it read somewhat like a textbook, which I attribute to the heavy subject matter. However, I rated it high because ...moreI have copies of the five mainstream books that Steven Pinker has released and am slowly working my way through them. He is one of the world's leading cognitive scientists and is a professor at MIT. I really enjoyed his first book "The Language Instinct", so was looking forward to reading his second "How The Mind Works". I didn't enjoy this one as much - at times it read somewhat like a textbook, which I attribute to the heavy subject matter. However, I rated it high because of the wealth of research and effort that went into it. If you'd like to read a lot of scientific case studies concerning how the mind works, then this book is for you. It delves into DNA, genes, family relationships both animal and human, and Darwinian theories, touting natural selection throughout the book. Steven Pinker is a Darwin evolution believer, which I am not, but I didn't let that influence my view or enjoyment of the book. I try to keep an open mind about all the things I read even if I don't personally agree with them. I must say that there were many interesting and revealing points and examples cited about animal and human behavior, social psychology and human nature.

Being an identical twin, I liked a true story Pinker told. In 1998 someone bit off half the ear of a California police officer. It was either Shawn Blick or Jonathan Blick, his identical twin brother. Both were scuffling with the officer and one of them bit off part of his ear. Both were charged with mayhem, attempted burglary, assaulting a police officer, and aggravated mayhem. The aggravated mayhem, for the ear biting, carried a life sentence. The officer testified that one of the twins had short hair and the other long, and it was the long-haired man that bit him. By the time the men surrendered three days later, they sported identical crew cuts and weren't talking. The lawyers argued that neither one could be given the severe sentence for aggravated mayhem, since for each twin brother there was reasonable doubt whether he did it, because it could have been the other.
(less)

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Jul 28, 2009

George rated it

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Pinker's "How the Mind Works" revolves around two central themes -- the computational theory of mind and natural selection. In the beginning, he devotes a lot of time and energy to shooting down other theories, which would be fine if he wasn't such a jerk about it. Most of his targets don't really seem to merit all that much energy, and his criticisms become simply a showcase for academic aggression, like a prizefighter working over some random guy picked up off the street. Strangely, ...more

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Jun 05, 2010

Roger Tavares rated it

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This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Jun 15, 2010

Zach rated it

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When it comes to non-fiction, I'm always on the lookout for the next Big Picture Book -- a book with a simple thesis that possesses startling explanatory power into how the world works. For modern economics and culture, there's Naomi Klein's No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs. For world history and ethnography, there's Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel. For the human brain, there's this book.

Pinker's thesis is very simply stated: the human brain is an organ designed by natu...moreWhen it comes to non-fiction, I'm always on the lookout for the next Big Picture Book -- a book with a simple thesis that possesses startling explanatory power into how the world works. For modern economics and culture, there's Naomi Klein's No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs. For world history and ethnography, there's Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel. For the human brain, there's this book.

Pinker's thesis is very simply stated: the human brain is an organ designed by natural selection to equip our ancestors to survive and reproduce in a very specific environment, and is therefore adapted to particular tasks. For brain functions as diverse as image processing, language, and abstract thought, Pinker lays out a very compelling reverse-engineering argument as to how these capabilities must have been selected for among our primate ancestors. His basic goal is to establish a clear-cut case that a "human nature" exists, and to describe how it was sculpted by natural selection. This idea is incredibly offensive to a large part of academia, who embrace the "blank slate" model of human behavior, and so Pinker spends quite a lot of time preemptively defending his thesis from these critics.

One of his most interesting chapters involves what he calls the "cognitive niche," the evolutionary space that allows a large problem-solving organ like the brain (which uses an incredible amount of our bodies' calories) to be a positive adaptation. Pinker makes a strong case that the kind of general-purpose intelligence that we possess is anything but inevitable in an evolutionary process -- after all, it has only evolved once so far. It might seem a prosaic insight, but it flies in the face of a thousand years of thought, including most post-Darwinian theorizing, that touts such metaphors as the "great chain of being" and the "evolutionary ladder." Rather, our intelligence came to be (and could only have come to be) in very particular circumstances, after a number of prerequisites had been fulfilled -- including good stereoscopic vision, social living, hands, and hunting.

The book's main flaw is that Pinker doesn't seem to understand who his audience is. Passages alternate between pedantically technical and ploddingly simple, as if he's writing for a layman one minute and a biologist the next. This gets especially bad during his bizarre, lengthy defense of natural selection as the agent of evolution, as well as when he's explaining neural networks. Frustratingly, these long, dense passages only exist to show that the status quo is wrong in some subtle respect that he never fully enunciates.

All in all, though, this book is an excellent introduction to evolutionary psychology, and shouldn't be missed.(less)

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Jul 28, 2011

Rob Dewitte added it · review of another edition

A compelling argument regarding how the mind works that dispels blank slate notions by presenting the evolutionary basis for and purpose of our current mental faculties--that is, we evolved to solve certain problems, and our minds evolved to make certain inferences and perform certain functions, consistent with that path. A reader without a strong science background might have some trouble with the technical vagaries of the evolution of vision and Pinker's "computational theory of mind"...more

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Jan 24, 2009

Brian rated it

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Shelves: non-fiction

Alternately technically impenetrable and grossly over-simplified, Pinker nevertheless delivers interesting insights into human behavior. Don't be confused, this book is about how the "mind" works, not the brain. Pinker tackles diverse mental functions from stereo vision to emotions to social interactions. His broad theory is that the way we think evolved as an aid to human survival, and that many behaviors we think of as "societal" are actually innate functions of the mind...more

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Oct 16, 2007

John rated it

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Alternate title: "How I can make up a flimsy evolutionary-psychology excuse for everything people do, and look sort of like the lead singer of Foreigner while I'm doing it."

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Aug 31, 2009

Dawn rated it

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Shelves: book-club-selection, own

Let's be honest. I will probably never pick up this book to finish it. I began reading this because of my book club. But, I didn't think I would finish it to begin with, and due to many circumstances, the book club will not be meeting for this book. So, I have decided to put it down as one of those books I'll never finish.

I didn't like most of what I read, not due to the subject/topic, but due to the way Pinker writes. His droning on on tangents and his shoving his philosophy, which ...more

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Nov 19, 2008

Kevin added it · review of another edition

thanks dad

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Oct 15, 2008

Josh Stein rated it

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Recommended to Josh by: Kent Anderson

Shelves: philosophy

Pinker's treatise on the naturalist mind looks like a science textbook, but the combination of computer programming and physiology laid on top of sociological metaphors and applicable understandings makes it a fantastic read. His ability to diffuse archaic arguments about the nature of the mind without appearing argumentative is what defines him as a great academic, and his ability to explain things to individuals with only a high school education (like me) is what defines him as a great writer....more

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May 16, 2008

Mommalibrarian rated it

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Shelves: nonfiction

This is a huge book which cannot be skimmed. The basic idea is computational theory of mind rather than neurons, synapse, and chemical reactions. I found the computational sections interesting but really bogged down in the parts where he illustrates his theories on mind biology in terms of natural selection as reserved in the genes rather than any learned or taught via psychological response. "The mind is a neural computer, fitted by natural selection with combinatorial algorithms for ca...more

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Dec 04, 2008

Katie marked it as to-read · review of another edition

This is an interesting read for anyone interested in an approachable book about cognitive psychology.

I have seen Pinker lecture twice, once for The Blank Slate and just recently for The Stuff of Thought. He is amazingly eloquent and I find myself constantly checking to see when he will be coming to Seattle.

Unfortunately my timing has been off on this book (I began reading it a week before beginning graduate school), but hopefully I can finish it during one of by schoo...more

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Feb 15, 2009

Jonathan rated it

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This book is by no means bad. In fact it is very good at what it does, which is reduce life and consciousness to bits of junk (my interpretation). If you want to feel insignificant, read this book ... by the end you will feel as important as a brick.

Please don't think that this makes this book any less impressive ... it is an awesome collection of state of the art research into human consciousness, neural networking, artificial intelligence, and thought. If you are able to learn the...more

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Sep 13, 2011

Ivan Soto rated it

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A more nearly accurate title for the book would have been "What We've Been Able to Figure Out About How The Mind Works." It's an interesting, but heavy read. Pinker, like many others, is a little awed with his own cleverness and that seems to affect his presentation of material and the examples he chooses to include. I enjoyed the book less that what I was expecting to, but still found it a good use of my reading time to get through it.

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Apr 27, 2011

Athena rated it

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I liked the book, i think it is an intellectually stimulating piece of work. My main objection is Pinker's notion that behaviour is adapted to a Stone Age way of life and cannot cope wery well with the modernity of Space Age world.

'Our brains', he writes, 'are not wired to cope with anonymous crowds, schooling, written language, governments, police, courts, armies, modern medicine, formal social institutions, high technology, and other newcomers to the human experience.'

I ca...more

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About Steven Pinker

Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of seven ...moreSteven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of seven books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, and most recently, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.

He was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973. He received a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.

Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. On May 13th 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.

In 2007, he was invited on The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns."

Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal. He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew." As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a school psychologist and writer, author of The Sexual Paradox.

Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. His current wife is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein. He has no children.

He is currently working on an upcoming book about the evolution of human morality, specifically focusing on "the historical decline of violence and its psychological roots" as stated by the author himself on <a href="">the Harvard website</a>.(less)

More about Steven Pinker...

Books by Steven Pinker

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

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Quotes from How the Mind Works

“Just as blueprints don't necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don't necessarily specify selfish organisms. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain. Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players."
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“the mind is a neural computer” — 11 people liked it

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