How the Mind Works

Good news and bad news. The good news is that upon completing this book - a book I've been reading on and off for more than three years now, dammit - I'm at 10,502 pages on the year for 2016, giving me an average of just barely a hair over 500 pages per book. So, yay! The year of #BigReads or #LongReads or whatever the hell I was calling it was a success! The bad news is that, as you can see if you've done the math, I only read 21 books in 2016 - a whopping three under my goal of two per month, which is especially disappointing considering I was perfectly on pace at twenty books through October. Oh well!

Next year, I'm not giving myself any goals or resolutions beyond "keep reading." I'll be back at work full time and likely still trying to cram in plenty of television and video games, so something will have to give, and everyone on the blog knows that the easiest logging habit to give up is reading. So I want to keep on reading! No page count goals, no overall counts to try to hit - just keep on reading. There are still plenty of books on my backlog, after all, and a limitless number beyond those. Far, far too many books for one lifetime, of course - but it doesn't hurt to keep on reading.

Oh, right - this book. This one's actually been on my backlog for close to ten years now - maybe even more? Written by one of the world's foremost cognitive scientists, it's an eight-chapter deep dive on the human mind and how it functions. Starts with the physiological properties of the brain and its components - how language is processed, how physical spaces are understood - and slowly transitions to the more abstract notion of the mind, including human behavior and evolutionary theories about how we got to be the way we are. I'm reasonably interested in psychology and social studies and evolutionary biology, and as such, I found the second half a lot more interesting than the first - especially since Pinker uses all kinds of unfortunately dated computer analogies that were surely more apt back in 1997 than they are today. (An updated version of this book might be able to milk a lot more out of "computational algorithm" metaphors, particularly given the huge advancements made in artificial intelligence and machine learning over the last two decades.)

Still a fascinating read with plenty to offer, and if you ever get a chance, check out some of Pinker's lectures and debates on YouTube. Guy's good at what he does!

And that's a wrap for me in 2016. Happy New Year, everyone!