This was another Pinker book I couldn't finish. If he was a taxi-driver he would take you from Brooklyn to New York via San Francisco. Sometimes even his asides have asides! Perhaps like pulp fiction writers he gets paid by the word.

Interesting and insightful. However it can occasionally lack clarity, lose the thread of what is being said. Even so, this is well worth snapping up for a summer read. Especially so if you have not read this kind of stuff before.

The book is more about how the brain processes infomation and stores it etc and doesnt really explain the emotional / feelings aspects of the mind. There are quite a few sensational chapter titles like Good Ideas etc which doesnt really live upto the titles. There are times when you can turn pages after pages with out knowing where it is leading , and ends up actually leading NOWHERE !!Nevertheless the book is a treasure box of ideas and very thought provoking. Gives some fresh perspective on evolution(though Billy Bryson does it better) , cultural evolution , mechanics of eye sight , some basic neurobiology (which could ahve been more detailed) etc. He does touches a lot of human behaviour (interesting) , but falls short explaing them in a satisfactory way( disappointing). You can better appreciate the book if you are a computer literate as it does draws lots of parallels between the working of a brain and programing concepts (recurssoins , pointers , OO :D Java , C++ anyone ?? ). Also presents some beutiful concepts on mind development of babies. Neverthe less the sensationalism in titles are a bit too much and I would'nt take what ever steven pinker says at face value and bear in mind that what ever is presented is just a theory , sadly the book can do better at conviction. I would recommend this book to some one looking for lots of new ideas on human behavior , wants a peek into how a human brain 'MIGHT' be working but does not expect a ready made answer. This book defenitly must be followed by more specialized books if you really want to get an idea of how the mind works.

To paraphrase from preface's the famous Dr. Noam Chomsky's (a personal hero) suggestion regarding our ignorance, we do not have any idea how this vast mystery called the mind could be solved. I have read this book the year it first came out (1997) and many times over since; should one still belive that thoughts, feelings, beliefs, meanings or ideas that all generated from this wonderful gold mine we called the mind can ever be understood? Dr. Pinker served as a wonderful tour guide to simply and elegantly point out some sailent features and functions of the mind that we ,I mean any non-psychologist, take for granted every day. I use my mind every day. (My wife and co-workers might want to argue otherwise, but they are wrong! I do think on a daily basis.). Yet I don't have any clue on the inner workings inside my own brain. Is the 17 th century French philiospher Rene Descart right when he proclaimed "I think therefore I am?" What insight and understanding have we gain regarding our mind since Descart's time? Another words, do we have any better understanding how thoughts and ideas are generated and processed in our mind? Dr. Pinker, now at Harvard and a gaint in this field, do not have the answers. As a matter of fact, he was not even sure all or any of our current understanding and guesses would later proven to be true. However, he has painted an overall picture on the state-of-art research on cognition. Oh, the book. It has eight chapters with interesting and enticing titles and he tried (I think and hope) to tickle readers' imaginations and challange our mostly unproven assumptions and beliefs. For example, under the standard equipment chapter, rationality and decision making serve as a frame work to discuss the complexity of our mind. He used the working definition of intlliegence (ie the ability to attain goals by assessing obstracles along the way and modify one's action to reach that point) to illustrate that we use our desires (ie the latest big screen Sony TV) and use our beliefs (ie if I work extra 50 hours per week to generate more income) to increase the chance of achieving that result (i.e. watching the Final Four basketball games on SONY big screen TV). Yet is this stimluli (vivid and beautiful live college hoops on TV) and response (working extra hours to generate estimated 5000 dollars of income) due to thinking or is this just a result fo a physical response from a sensory input? Do we endlessly shop for junks we cannot possibly need because of a physcial response of a sensory stimuli and not due to brain activities at all? Perhaps endless charges on credit cards of the mall rats have nothing to do with the minds or intelligence but a mere knee-jerk response to stimuli. What about the molecular/celluar level of the brain? Can we understand how the mind work if we exam and understand how each cell in our brain work and therefore how the mind work? From page 99, Dr. Pinker stated from the mathematicians Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts that neurons have one purpose in life: "add up a set of qualites and compare the sum to a threshold and indicate whether the threshod is exceeded." Are you joking me? With a description like this, it sounded more like a description of a computer than a living breathing cell let alone a functional neuron. Suppose we have a complete and perfect understanding of a neuron on a celluar and molecular level, as he pointed out in the next few pages it is the interconnectiveness (my own invention to summarize the vastly complicated neural networks) that might be more important than any single cell. Another words, perhaps thoghts, ideas, imagination, emotions and other abstraction generated from our mind might be the results of these "supercomputer" networking. This conjucture might be completely wrong but interesting nevertheless. What about complexity itself? Can the fact that we are the product of millions of years of natural selections and therefore the c

Have you been amazed by the things your body can do(and probably cannot do) ... like the great stereo vision, the spatial hearing capability, the ease at which we learn/speak/update multiple languages. How does our brain achieve all this? How does our brain stores and incorporates new information? Where do human emotions come from? What is the reason behind anger, fear and other multitudes of human emotions? What is this thing called consciousness? What is the reason behind the peculiar male, female behaviour? What makes our ties to blood relations so strong? Why we find enjoyment in Art? What is life ... Why do we exist?

I personally have been intrigued by these and more of these questions. Most of the time we relegate answers to these questions to some divine entity and many of them we just take for granted. However, this is one of the books that attempts to answer or shares insights to answers to some of these questions. In short this book is going to blow your mind away(literally & figuratively). This book not only tries to enlighten us but also makes us ask more questions about our own existence. In general author contends that the evolution process contributed towards the development of different faculties. In affect we own most of our cool faculties to survival instinct of our genes. The author(a great scientist) provides some interesting evidences to support his thinking.

One thing I liked about this book is that it is written in a very simple and easy to comprehend language. It avoids references to tongue twisting weird words like Myelography, Parietal, Occipital. Another thing I liked about this book is that it conveys lots of nice information/know-how via the means of references to interesting anecdotes from Calvin and Hobbes, Godfather and like.

All in all this is a must, must read ... it is going to leave your awe-struck!

-Sachin