Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

524 | HOW THE MIND WORKSallusions and displays of virtuosity. However fascinating and worthy ofour support they are, they tend to obscure the psychology of aesthetics,not to illuminate it.Another reason the psychology of the arts is obscure is that they are notadaptive in the biologist's sense of the word. This book has been aboutthe adaptive design of the major components of the mind, but that doesnot mean that I believe that everything the mind does is biologicallyadaptive. The mind is a neural computer, fitted by natural selection withcombinatorial algorithms for causal and probabilistic reasoning aboutplants, animals, objects, and people. It is driven by goal states that servedbiological fitness in ancestral environments, such as food, sex, safety,parenthood, friendship, status, and knowledge. That toolbox, however,can be used to assemble Sunday afternoon projects of dubious adaptivevalue.Some parts of the mind register the attainment of increments of fitnessby giving us a sensation of pleasure. Other parts use a knowledge ofcause and effect to bring about goals. Put them together and you get amind that rises to a biologically pointless challenge: figuring out how toget at the pleasure circuits of the brain and deliver little jolts of enjoymentwithout the inconvenience of wringing bona fide fitness incrementsfrom the harsh world. When a rat has access to a lever that sendselectrical impulses to an electrode implanted in its medial forebrain bundle,it presses the lever furiously until it drops of exhaustion, forgoingopportunities to eat, drink, and have sex. People don't yet undergo electiveneurosurgery to have electrodes implanted in their pleasure centers,but they have found ways to stimulate them by other means. An obviousexample is recreational drugs, which seep into the chemical junctions ofthe pleasure circuits.Another route to the pleasure circuits is via the senses, which stimulatethe circuits when they are in environments that would have led tofitness in past generations. Of course a fitness-promoting environmentcannot announce itself directly. It gives off patterns of sounds, sights,smells, tastes, and feels that the senses are designed to register. Now, ifthe intellectual faculties could identify the pleasure-giving patterns,purify them, and concentrate them, the brain could stimulate itself with-