Opinion of How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker - Book Report/Review Example

?Book Opinion of How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker There are many books that talk about the mind and how to use it to bring about miraculous things. There are many new age books that state how people can use their minds to control their emotions and to live more fully. In this book, Pinker (1997) provides the reader with an understanding of the mind from a scientific point of view. One interesting point in the beginning of the book was that Pinker states that no one really knows how the mind works. He also explains that he does not know how the mind works, though he is a cognitive scientist. I thought to myself, “then why die he write the book?” The premise was intriguing enough to make me want to read on. He explains that he’s chosen a variety of theories that he thought would prove insight for the reader as to how the mind works with the rest of the world. The Mind is Comprised of Many Systems Pinker states that he is a cognitive scientist which means that he is used to studying the mind in general terms. According to Nadel and Piattelli-Palmarini (n.d.) cognitive science is “the scientific study of minds” (p. 1). They state that this can be the minds of animals or people, or it can mean artificial intelligence, it does not matter. This was an interesting insight because I wanted to understand exactly what Pinker did so that I could set the stage for an understanding of his work. In the first chapter of the book, he states that he will explore interesting and quirky things and he will show why a child can be a brat, why people lose their tempers, why makeup changes how someone looks and more. Again, these concepts are interesting enough to continue reading. Pinker starts the chapter talking about robots which did not make sense. He was not exactly comparing the human mind to robots, but as he moved into that chapter he said that the mind is actually a “system of organs” which can be thought of as “psychological faculties or mental modules” (p. 27). As humans, we use the words “the mind” very often in conversation. To think of it as a system or one unit was interesting. The author explains that the mind must have a series of components to it because it can do so many things. One of the ways that we can tell this, he suggests, is how our minds begin to act before we really think about it. We have an intuitive psychological sense that guides us in an ability to try and discern how other people will act according to their behaviors. We have to decide that other people have desires and beliefs in order for our intuitive psychology to work. Connecting intuition to psychology seemed to be an oxymoron because psychology is supposed to be scientific. Although Freud did take about consciousness and the unconsciousness, intuition seems to be something that we cannot put into a test tube or examine in a scientific way. Sperber (1997) takes this thought a bit further by stating that humans have two types of beliefs: Intuitive and reflective. Sperber says that the intuition is in the mind. Perhaps this is what Pinker is talking about. Logically, the mind must be made from specialized parts because of what it has to do, according to Pinker. Pinker made it seem as though we could tell exactly what to do in most situations by using our mind. Our mind is able to do so many things because it is made up of so many modules. Pinker also states that “nature does not dictate what we should accept or how we should live our lives” (p. 52). Many people might suggest that he is wrong because of their religious orientation. They would say that God would be the one who would dictate how we should liver or lives based on the dogma that they believe in. The author seems to give a variety of ideas that some people would enjoy be cause he is an out-of-the-box thinker, while others may think he is a bit crazy. The Mind as a Thinking Machine Pinker states that the mind does act like a computer and this is why it can do so many things. But it is better than a computer because it can remember and it can tell the difference between two things that are similar. He states that people can generalize things because the mind makes representations of what it sees rather than creating exactly what it sees. The mind is very sophisticated and can draw on these various representations to connect representations that are already in the mind. This means that when someone learns something new, they are able to connect the dots so to speak to memories that they have and bring forth representations that make sense to them. These representations will be similar to what they already know. The mind also stores information like a computer and allows us to link the information to a variety of new pieces of information. This information allows us to understand many different kinds of data that relates to the stored information. Consciousness has also been a subject of debate, especially within the last several years as many movies and books have been brought forth about the Law of Attraction and other types of “things” that we can do with the mind. Pinker states that consciousness is still difficult to explain because it “presents us with puzzle after puzzle” (p. 132). It seems that no one really understands the concept of consciousness although they spend time writing about it. This is a concept that has ben debated by many people, and some wonder whether it exists at all. Consciousness could be just a mysterious word for intelligence, according to the author. He also suggests that consciousness includes several senses: 1. Self-knowledge—he states that self-knowledge is not mysterious. It is something that ties the individual’s experiences that they have in the world to their memories. 2. Access to information – we have specific information how we take in information, but we do not have information about how the body functions to do this. We do understand when something goes wrong however, because our body will let us feel that something is not right. His point in this section was lost. 3. Sentience – Pinker did not actually define what this sense was, but he went off on a tangent about consciousness in general and his point was very difficult to follow. He says that sentience is the mysterious part of the mind that people attribute to miracles. However, he did not tell much about this to make it understandable. The Mind as a Seeing Sense The mind is able to look at optical illusions and process them in ways that we as humans do not always understand. Pinker talks about perception and how the mind helps us to perceive those things and situations that surround us. Pinker uses a variety of explanations from science to talk bout how the eye sees and why it is important to perception. He says that when the eyes see an object, they see two different images on their retinae and they are perceived as two different but similar images. He gives the example of the 3-D image and says that although it may be a 3-D image, we only see it as a 2-D image on the retinae. The challenge is that an object loses its shape because a shape cannot frame one object at a time. The impression of the object comes from a variety of different places rather than just that one object that we are looking at. Pinker talks about how the eye sees and what it sees but he goes on and on without really explaining anything. Evolution of the Mind Although Pinker talks about evolution and the mind throughout the book, he devotes a full chapter to it. He presents the ideas of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Both of these men “independently discovered natural selection” (p. 299). However, they differed in the area of the mind and what it did. Wallace believed that the mind was “over designed for the needs of evolving humans” (p. 299) and he thought that the mind could not be explained by natural selection. He believed that “a superior intelligence” was actually pushing “man in a definite direction, and one for a special purpose” (p. 299-300). This comment was a precursor to his leaning towards becoming a creationist, which would lead him to thinking that certain aspects of intelligence were not important to certain historical epochs. His belief was that early ancestors did not need superior intelligence because they only needed the amount of information for their particular daily life. Therefore, there had to be this other force at play because the stronger intelligence would not be available to them. In other words, in times when man only needed to hunt and gather food, they did not have the intelligence to create fire until they needed it. However, it seemed that since they did not have intelligence to do this, that they were lead by this superior power. Stephen Jay Gould had a different idea of what the mind did and how it evolved. Pinker states that he agrees with Gould’s idea that “the brain has been exapted for novelties like calculus and chess …” (p. 301). This statement was confusing because it was a summary of what Gould actually said. I had a challenge with the word “exapted” and could not find it in a standard dictionary. I found that it was a biology term and it means (at least in the sentence in the book) that the brain was important for thinking, but it also was able to be used to do complex problems like calculus or chess. I was not quite sure what he meant by this or why it was important. Ecological Intelligence Pinker states that the mind is influenced by the outside environment around it. It has adapted to this environment as it needed something. As an example, he points out that the early ancestors only had to deal with the challenges of everyday life and that the environment was more difficult for them than it is for us today. They had to learn the local language, find a mate, understand how to hunt animals and so forth. They did not have to worry about putting a man on the moon or to do any other sophisticated thinking. Pinker also states that people “put things and other people into mental boxes, give each box a name, and thereafter treat the contents of the box the same” (p. 306). I do not think this is necessarily a positive thing because people can miss important information about others when they only accept what they have put into the box. My Thoughts on the Book This book was 565 pages of written text, and it was longer if we were to count the endnotes and the index. The book was entertaining at first but it became tedious after awhile. Pinker had too many ideas to put into one book, and it was difficult to follow what he was attempting to say. I still do not know whether he answered the question of what the mind did. Pinker stated in the beginning that he was a cognitive scientist which made me understand that he was already studying the mind and how it thinks. It seemed to me that he could have opened this discussion in a more concrete way. Perhaps he had so much to say that he had a difficult time narrowing down his thoughts. When I sit down to read a book, I want to be entertained form the beginning to the end. At first, his concepts were intriguing because they were new. However, too much of anything can be overwhelming and this is how I felt as I continued to read the book. I attempted to read the entire book but I could not get through all of it. The book seemed to talk in circles and be redundant in spots. I thought that he could have concentrated more on a few ideas instead of trying to cram so much in the book. The book was not easy to ready because Pinker continued to go off on many tangents. He gave examples that did not seem relevant to how the mind works. Of course, it is my opinion that since no one knows how the mind works, and because it is just a matter of opinion as to how it works, that opinions can be kept to a minimum. Pinker used words sometimes that are not common words. As an example, the word exapted was a biology term. It was not in a standard dictionary so it was not in my Microsoft WORD dictionary either. It seemed as though this book was not for the general reader, so this may be why it was longer than expected. One thing that made a bit more sense to me, if I look at Pinker’s point of view, is why so many people have difficulty understanding the concept of the Law of Attraction. Many people have the challenge of comprehending this concept and since Pinker says that the mind does not understand the concept of free will, then it stands to reason that anything that is strongly esoteric or very abstract, would be difficult for the mind to comprehend. This may mean that it is something genetic to do with how a person grows up and the concepts that they adopt as they grow up under whatever circumstances they grow up within. Of course, this is my idea or conjecture on my part, but it seems that this is as good an idea as anything that Pinker is saying. Pinker promotes the idea that the mind as a computer that processes data through a set of rules. This is a tidy example of how the mind works, but it made me wonder why some of us have such disorganized thoughts some times. I mean, it seems that most people have minds that jump around and grasp things that have no relevance to our lives sometimes but we think those thoughts anyway. Also, what about dreams? How does the mind work about dreams? Some of what he said about the mind storing certain images is probably true, but I wonder how the mind works to bring us dreams when we are sleeping. The information was new to me and I am not sure how it relates to the course. I do know that for some people it has been an important read. In some of the reviews I read, people called this work brilliant or extraordinary, but I just did not see this. I think that the old adage of, as a man thinketh so he is, is probably correct in this situation. This man thinketh a lot and it seems that other people think like him. But I am not sure what relevance Pinker is bringing to the world with his book. I would have liked to see the book condensed to about 200 pages at the most, to see what he would have done with it. Perhaps this would have stopped him from rambling so much. References Nadel and Piattelli-Palmarini (n.d.). What is cognitive science? Retrieved from http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~massimo/publications/PDF/LN&MPPIntro.pdf Pinker, S. (1997). How the mind works. NY: Norton and Company. Sperber, D. (1997). Intuitive and reflective beliefs. Mind and Language, 12 (1), 67-83. Retrieved from http://cogprints.org/402/1/beliefs.htm Read More