The human mind is not, strictly speaking, a strange sort of biological computer, a repository for the reasoning portion of a person's immortal soul, or an improbable symbiosis of raw passion and cold logic. But what, exactly, is it? Steven Pinker, MIT professor of psychology and author of the pop-science bestseller The Language Instinct, thinks he knows part of the answer. In How The Mind Works, he addresses the aforementioned theories and rejects them all in favor of an elegant, relatively simple, and surprisingly common-sense explanation: The mind is a system of interrelationships between organs of sense and computation. By exploring hundreds of real-life examples of cogitation and human behavior, how people think and react in different situations, and how the thought process has influenced human societies, Pinker explores the fashion in which natural selection has evolved our thinking. He is an excellent teacher as well as a good writer, crafting his examples and explanations with the kind of care and insistence on accuracy that is often missing from popular-science writing, while at the same time maintaining the reader's interest with wit and attention to the real-world relevance of his ideas. Which is, of course, a considerable task: The question of how people think is fundamental to all learning, and Pinker's excellent book is a fine place to begin asking.