From bestselling author Stephen Pinker, How the Mind Works draws on the latest scientific research to present a blueprint for the most sophisticated machine on Earth: the human brain. Why do we laugh? What makes memories fade? Why do fools fall in love? Why do people believe in ghosts? How do we recognize a face? How the Mind Works explores every aspect of our brains, showing that our minds are not a mystery, but rather a system designed by natural selection over years of human evolution. Whether looking at optical illusions or religion, Mozart or films, Stephen Pinker offers us a new way of understating ourselves. 'Witty, lucid and ultimately enthralling' Observer 'Powerful and gripping ... To have read it is to have consulted a first draft of the structural plan of the human psyche ... a glittering tour de force' Spectator 'Witty popular science that you enjoy reading fro the writing as well as for the science ... He is a top-rate writer, and deserves the superlatives that are lavished on him' The New York Times 'Pinker has a remarkable capacity to explain difficult ideas and he writes with the comic verve of Martin Amis or Woody Allen ... How the Mind Works will change the way your mind works' The Times Steven Pinker is a best-selling author and Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for cognitive Neuroscience at MIT. Pinker has been awarded research prizes from the National Academy of Sciences and the American Psychological Association, graduate and undergraduate teaching prizes from MIT, and book prizes from the American Psychological Association, the Linguistics Society of America and the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and The Language Instinct.