How the Mind Works.

A book called How the Mind Works by an acclaimed science writer has to be important, so I'm a little ashamed that I had such a hard time reading it. Steven Pinker is the energetic cognitive scientist at MIT whose previous work, The Language Instinct, was a much-hailed bestseller. Here, Pinker synthesizes and defends the view of the mind that's emerged from two distinct but increasingly intertwined strains of modern science: evolutionary psychology (which argues that our minds, like our bodies, are the product of eons of Darwinian natural selection), and artificial intelligence (which, by replicating human processes, sheds light on the engineering feats involved in mundane activities like guzzling a beer). Pinker argues persuasively, if hardly romantically, that the mind is "a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve the kind of problems our ancestors faced in their foraging way of life" The book articulates and applies this approach--amounting to what Pinker dubs "reverse engineering the psyche"--to everything from our eyes' design and the nature of altruism to the thorny question of why humans still find poems, jokes, and even love indispensable.

Though Pinker's sprawling inventory of today's science is often compelling, the more interesting thing may be the eerie feeling you get from using your mind to read all this cold detail about, well, your mind. It's like eavesdropping on a conversation between people who you suddenly feel certain know you better than you know yourself, as they parse what you presumed were your unfathomable (and charming) mysteries.

But that was when I was awake. Other reviewers have already hailed Pinker's latest as "always sparkling," calling Pinker himself "a top-rate writer" who "deserves the superlatives that are lavished on him" Well, yes, but won't anyone else 'fess up and say that much of the book is unreadable? To be sure, Pinker's prose is often lively, and the text is dotted with pop-culture references to the "Twilight Zone," "Saturday Night Live," Dr. Strangelove, and Don Corleone. But Pinker's desire to make the science go down easy can't compensate for hundreds of sentences like this one: "The other answer is that the unique pattern of symbol manipulations triggered by the first symbol mirrors the unique pattern of relationships between the referent of the first symbol and the referents of the triggered symbols" Got that? Fortunately, as with Dickens, it turns out you can skip 10 pages here or there and not really lose the drift. But then Dickens had an excuse: he was paid by the word.

It's hard to know what to make of this disappointment. I don't think it's that I'm a lazy anti-science philistine--for example, I devoured a book that covered some of Pinker's ground more grippingly, Robert Wright's The Moral Animal. And Pinker's vivid explanations of many points make it clear the fault does not lie entirely with him. So perhaps the problem lies not with ourselves, but with our science. It's just not as easy as it was in, say, 1750, for a reasonably intelligent layman to follow the march of science while also staying awake.

Matthew Miller is a senior write at U.S. News & World Report and a syndicated columnist.