The least interesting is the lack of substance in the theory of How the mind works. Full with interesting specific cases and references to studies. The most interesting is the variety of topics covered in the book.
What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting? But the book NEVER explains HOW the mind does it. The book explains very well WHAT the mind works, and WHY does it make sense that the mind does what it does. The book is very interesting, but Pinker got the title wrong. Yes, I'd definitively recommend it to friends. Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why? I would also say that as the mother of a truck-loving toddler girl who has been told by other mothers that "girls don't like trucks," I see gender roles being socially constructed every day. The book was written in the 90's, so the author had probably been on the receiving end of a lot of fuzzy thinking about everything being socially constructed, but his harping makes the book seem incredibly dated (especially compared to the User Illusion, which still seems very fresh).
The book is actually about evolutionary biology, and Pinker spends a huge amount of the book bashing feminists and sociologists. The author is not particularly interested in how the mind actually works (and when he does talk about the mechanisms of thinking, he gets terribly bogged down in computer programming minutiae). I really liked Eagleman's Incognito, Lehrer's How We Decide, Nørretranders' User Illusion and even Kahneman's plodding Thinking Fast and Slow, so How the MInd Works seemed like a good fit. I got this audiobook on sale for $4.95 and probably wouldn't have gotten it otherwise. There are so many better books on this topic It's holding up very well though and an afterword written only a couple of years ago is included which explains how recent research relates to the book. This book was written more than 10 years ago. The Better Angels of our Nature, and The Blank Slate are easier to pick up just listening once so I would recommend one of those as a place to start. If you consider yourself an intellectual, you'll want to be familiar with Stephen Pinker's work. It requires a lot of concentration or you can do what I did and just listen to everything twice, sometimes three times, until you get it. It's a much easier read than actual research papers, and has wit and good story telling to leven the large doses of information, but it's not easy to follow when listening. As always, he doesn't just make assertions, he backs everything up by explaining the state of the research and the ideas of the researchers in the field (even when those ideas are different from his). Pinker answers a lot of questions about how and why people think the way they do.
What made the experience of listening to How the Mind Works the most enjoyable?
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