Steven Pinker

Dr. Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading cognitive scientists, asks audacious questions about the functions of the human mind, and boldly sets out to answer them. Author of the acclaimed best-seller How The Mind Works, Pinker is a Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Enormously popular in the mainstream media as well and highly respected in scientific and technical circles, Pinker is known for his wit, verve, and long curly hair. He was named among Newsweek's "100 Americans for the Next Century" and is included in Esquire's "Register of Outstanding Men and Women." He is also author of a previous best-seller, The Language Instinct.

How The Mind Works is a bold, ambitious, illustrated presentation based on a simple yet revolutionary idea: that the mind is a system of specialized mental organs, shaped by natural selection to solve problems faced by our ancestors during their evolutionary history as hunter-gatherers. In the tradition of such ground-breaking thinkers as Noam Chomsky and Edward O. Wilson, Pinker brings together the "computational theory of the mind," which maintains that the fundamental activity of the brain is to process information, with the theory of natural selection, which he argues is the only process that creates complex engineering design in animals, brains, and bodies. In a style laced with humor and accessible references to current events and pop culture, Pinker provides breathtaking insight into how we make decisions, why we take risks, what makes a genius different from the rest of us.

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