Pinker; How the Mind Works
Book	Page	Topic
Pinker; How the Mind Works	28	Brain supplies the missing information. [Gestalts]
Pinker; How the Mind Works	30	We try to infer people's beliefs and desires from what they do, and try to predict what they will do from our guesses about their beliefs and desires. [Bayesian inference]	2
Pinker; How the Mind Works	30	If someone appears to have the same parents as you do, treat the person as if their genetic well-being overlaps with yours.	0
Pinker; How the Mind Works	30	Mental modules are not likely to be discernible as circumscribed territories on the surface of the brain. Mental modules are probably sprawling messily on the bulges and crevices of the brain.	0
Pinker; How the Mind Works	36	Richard Dawkins, Blind Watchmaker	6
Pinker; How the Mind Works	40	Human brain is a product of evolution.	4
Pinker; How the Mind Works	41	Evolutionary psychology, much overlap with sociobiology of the 1970s and 1980s.	1
Pinker; How the Mind Works	45	Biologist E. O. Wilson was doused with a pitcher of ice water at a scientific convention.	4
Pinker; How the Mind Works	64	The mind is the activity of the brain.	19
Pinker; How the Mind Works	65	Gestalt psychology tried to explain visual illusions and terms of electromagnetic force fields. [electromagnetic force fields debunked]	1
Pinker; How the Mind Works	67	Mathematician Alan Turing.	2
Pinker; How the Mind Works	93	Philosopher John Searle.	26
Pinker; How the Mind Works	97	Mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, quantum mechanical effects, microtubules. [much skepticism]	4
Pinker; How the Mind Works	124	The trick that multiplies human thoughts into truly astronomical numbers is a kind of mental fecundity called recursion.	27
Pinker; How the Mind Works	124	Recursion -- hierarchical tree structure of propositions inside propositions.	0
Pinker; How the Mind Works	125	Looping design of iterative information processing implemented in neural networks.	1
Pinker; How the Mind Works	125	Unless neural networks are specifically assembled into a recursive processor, they cannot handle our recursive thoughts.	0
Pinker; How the Mind Works	126	Neural networks easily implement a fuzzy logic in which everything is a kind of something to some degree. [Bayesian inference]	1
Pinker; How the Mind Works	127	Form fuzzy stereotypes by insightfully soaking up correlations among properties, taking advantage of the fact that things in the world tend to fall into clusters. [Gestalts]	1
Pinker; How the Mind Works	128	Rule systems couch knowledge in compositional, quantified, recursive propositions.	1
Pinker; How the Mind Works	128	Collections of recursive propositions interlock to form modules or intuitive theories about particular domains of experience, such as kinship, intuitive science, intuitive psychology.	0
Pinker; How the Mind Works	135	The most interesting sense of all, sentience -- subjective experience.	7
Pinker; How the Mind Works	135	Access consciousness has four obvious features -- (1) rich field of sensation, (2) spotlight of attention, (3) sensations and thoughts come with an emotional flavoring, (4) an executive, the "I", appears to make choices and pull the levers of behavior.	0
Pinker; How the Mind Works	144	Antonio Damasio has noted that damage to the anterior cingulate cortex, which receives input from many higher perceptual areas and is connected to the higher levels of the motor system, leaves a patient in a seemingly alert but strangely unresponsive state.	9
Pinker; How the Mind Works	160	Theory of complexity -- mathematical principles of order underlying many complex systems -- galaxies, crystals, weather systems, cells, organisms, brains, ecosystems, societies, etc.	16
Pinker; How the Mind Works	161	Pioneers of complexity theory such as Stuart Kauffman and Murray Gell-Mann.	1
Pinker; How the Mind Works	183	The brains of mammals, like the bodies of mammals, follow a common general plan; however, the major lobes and patches of the human brain have been revamped. The primary sensory areas take up a smaller proportion of the whole brain, while the later areas for complex processing have expanded. The temporo-parietal areas for visual information, language and conceptual regions, areas for hearing, especially for understanding speech, and the prefrontal lobes for deliberate thought and planning have greatly expanded proportionately.	22
Pinker; How the Mind Works	204	Mitochondrial Eve of 200,000 to 100,000 years ago.	21
Pinker; How the Mind Works	378	Disgust is a universal human emotion.	174
Pinker; How the Mind Works	379	Most Westerners cannot stomach the thought of eating insects, worms, codes, maggots, caterpillars, or grubs, but these are all highly nutritious and have been eaten by the majority of peoples throughout history.	1
Pinker; How the Mind Works	523	What is it about the mind that lets people take pleasure in shapes and colors and sounds and jokes and stories and myths?	144
Pinker; How the Mind Works	524	The mind is a "neural computer" fitted by natural selection with combinatorial algorithms for causal and probabilistic reasoning about plants, animals, objects, and people. [Bayesian inference]	1
Pinker; How the Mind Works	524	The mind's neural computer is driven by goal states that served biological fitness in ancestral environments, such as food, sex, safety, parenthood, friendship, and knowledge.	0
Pinker; How the Mind Works	524	Some parts of the mind register the attainment of increments of fitness by giving us a sensation of pleasure.	0
Pinker; How the Mind Works	524	Recreational drugs seep into the chemical junctions of the pleasure circuits.	0
Pinker; How the Mind Works	537	Rhythm is a universal components of music. People dance, nod, shake, swing, stride, clap, and snap to music, and that is a strong hint that music taps into the system of motor control.	13
Pinker; How the Mind Works	538	Music recreates the motivational and emotional components of movement.	1
Pinker; How the Mind Works	538	Perhaps music creates a resonance in the brain between neurons firing in synchrony with a sound wave and a natural oscillation in the emotion circuits?	0
Pinker; How the Mind Works