Currently reading
The Story of English in 100 Words
State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability Still Possible?
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
Selected Poems
Complete Works
Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism
An Historical and Critical Dictionary Translated Into English with Many Additions and Corrections Made by the Author Himself
Great Paintings
Shelley's Nature Poems
Philosophy of Biology: An Anthology
Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays
I don't really know How The Mind Works, I haven't read Pinker's masterpiece yet. I can imagine it, however, as a complex combination of neurons firing in various areas of the brain to help you visualize an image of the thing you're thinking about .To speak for myself, I think in pictures. when I think about something or remember a person, I visualize a picture of him or her or something strongly associated with them. For example, when I see the word " Plato", I visualize Plato as represented in Raphael's School of Athens, pointing up to his world of ideas. The same thing holds for "Einstein": I see Einstein riding his bicycle trying to catch a beam of light. A moustache for Nietzsche; a teapot for Russell; a monkey for Darwin; a crazy particle for Heisenberg, and so forth .
How about professor Hawking?? No, its neither a black hole, as you might have expected, nor a chair. I see a word--an English word written in capital bold letters. I see HOPE.
Alongside all science that you get when you finish a book written by this great man, you learn something more important. Surely, I will not live long enough to see if the universe will end in a Big Crunch as it started in a Big Bang, or to verify if there is really a Theory of Everything, nor do I care if there were parallel universes. These things mean to me no more than what Greece mythology mean to any person in our days. What you really learn from Hawking's books is that one must not lose HOPE.
1