Subliminal
The New Unconscious and What it Teaches Us
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3.9 • 8 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Leonard Mlodinow, the best-selling author of The Drunkard's Walk and coauthor of The Grand Design (with Stephen Hawking) and War of the Worldviews (with Deepak Chopra) here examines how the unconscious mind shapes our experience of the world, and how, for instance, we often misperceive everything from our relationships with family, friends and business associates, the reasons for our investment decisions, to our own past.
Your preference in politicians, the amount of tip you give the waiter-all our judgments and perceptions-reflect the workings of our mind on two levels, the conscious, of which we are aware, and the unconscious, which is hidden from us. The latter has long been the subject of speculation, but over the past two decades scientific researchers have developed remarkable new tools for probing the hidden, or subliminal, workings of the mind. The result of this explosion of research is a new science of the unconscious, and a sea change in our understanding of how the mind affects the way we live.
These cutting-edge discoveries have revealed that the way we experience life-our perception, behavior, memory, and social judgment-is largely driven by the mind's subliminal processes and not by the conscious ones, as we have long believed. Employing his trademark wit and his lucid, accessible explanations of the most obscure scientific subjects, Leonard Mlodinow takes us on a tour of this research, unraveling the complexities of the subliminal self, increasing our understanding of how the human mind works, and how we interact with friends, strangers, spouses and coworkers. In the process he changes our view of ourselves and the world around us.
Customer Reviews
Coarse and a little foolish, sometimes also inaccurate.
I had a hunch I was going to be wasting my money by buying this book and the hunch was right. Another self-congratulatory excursion that diminishes the work of much more insightful people in order to utter smugly the proud words "now we know!" While expounding his 19th century reductive and materialistic doctrine, this author has little to say (at least in this book) about anything that might be of interest to anyone but the uninformed. The author is also selective with information including gross inaccuracies in line with his bias. In so doing he is a published example of how unconscious a person can be and therefore earns two stars for providing himself as a case in point.
Wish I hadn't wasted my time
Disappointed. There have been countless books written about the subconscious and all of them saying the same thing pretty much. I thought judging by the words used to sell this book that this one would provide new insight and possibly offer alternative ways of dealing with fixed, life damaging beliefs. It didn't.
This book is clouded in science and backed up with experiments. After rambling on for several chapters about the experiments that prove we act subconsciously, there was then a sense of 'so what?' or 'then what?' that was never answered. I suppose it depends upon what you are looking for but for me, it was a waste of my time and money.