Series in Cognitive Psychology
Books in Cognitive Psychology
How the Mind Works
" [How the Mind Works ] marks out the territory on which the coming century's debate about human nature will be held."―Oliver Morton, The New Yorker In this extraordinary bestseller, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading cognitive scientists, does for the rest of the mind what he did for language in his 1994 book, The Language Instinct . He explains what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life. And he does it with the wit that prompted Mark Ridley to write in the New York Times Book Review , "No other science writer makes me laugh so much. . . . [Pinker] deserves the superlatives that are lavished on him." The arguments in the book are as bold as its title. Pinker rehabilitates some unfashionable ideas, such as that the mind is a computer and that human nature was shaped by natural selection, and challenges fashionable ones, such as that passionate emotions are irrational, that parents socialize their children, and that nature is good and modern society corrupting. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize A New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1997 Featured in Time magazine, the New York Times Magazine , The New Yorker , Nature , Science, Lingua Franca , and Science Times Front-page reviews in the Washington Post Book World , the Boston Globe Book Section , and the San Diego Union Book Review Illustrations
Perspective In Perspective
Originally published in 1983, this book is about the way we see things – or think we do, which is by no means the same – and about the ways in which we have tried to reproduce that visual concept in diagrams, pictures, photographs, films and television. Whatever the medium, if any degree of realism is intended, some use of perspective is inevitable, and some understanding of it can aid the appreciation of the result. But here the technicalities of perspective geometry are treated as far as possible non-technically, by a common-sense approach. Students, would-be artists or architects, are warned in the Preface that they will travel second-class in the author’s train of thought (the ‘general reader’ coming first), but they may well find the journey worthwhile in that it provides a background to a subsequent, more detailed studies. Lawrence Wright shows that every form of perspective representation has some innate falsity, but that most such forms offer an adequate makeshift; that rules of geometry often need to be bent; that labour-saving dodges and shortcuts exist. As he says, perspective drawing, like politics, is an art of the possible. In reading this book, beginners may find it all simpler than they had supposed, though the established expert may in some interesting respects find just the opposite. The general reader may thereafter find himself seeing things – and representations of them – in a new light.
Thinking and Reasoning
Our extraordinary capacity to reason and solve problems sets us aside from other animals, but our evolved thinking processes also leave us susceptibile to bias and error. The study of thinking and reasoning goes back to Aristotle, and was one of the first topics to be studied when psychology separated from philosophy. In this Very Short Introduction Jonathan Evans explores cognitive psychological approaches to understanding the nature of thinking and reasoning, problem solving, and decision making. He shows how our problem solving capabilities are hugely dependent on also having the imagination to ask the right questions, and the ability to see things from a completely new perspective. Beginning by considering the approaches of the behaviourists and the Gestalt psychologists, he moves on to modern explorations of thinking, including hypothetical thinking, conditionals, deduction, rationality, and intuition. Covering the role of past learning, IQ, and cognitive biases, Evans also discusses the idea that there may be two different ways of thinking, arising from our evolutionary history. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.