How The Mind Works

“But the gap between robots in imagination and in reality is my starting point, for it shows the first step we must take in knowing ourselves: appreciating the fantastically complex design behind feats of mental life we take for granted.” 

This quote summarizes the entire premise of the book and the recurring theme of building a robot. In the book, Pinker discusses how the mind works using the premise of trying to build a robot that is like a human. This example encourages us to step outside ourselves to view how our minds work and realize how complex it is to try and create something we take for granted every day: our mind. To understand the human mind is to know ourselves, and that is another underlying theme of this book. To be able to look at the mind involves using our mind to reason about our mind. That feat is not easy. It is difficult to see into the inner workings of any object using the object itself. However, one of the amazing things about the mind is that we can do just that. We can use our own mind to understand how the mind works, and as Pinker points out, that is the first step to knowing ourselves. 

“And because this research can measure only the ways in which people differ, it says little about the design of the mind that all normal people share. But by showing how many ways the mind can vary in its innate structure, the discoveries open our eyes to how much structure the mind must have.” 

In discussing how the mind works, Pinker acknowledges that a lot of research has been conducted on people whose minds did not work typically. Either an injury or some genetic alteration produced a brain that behaved differently than what we see in most people.