Subliminal
author of The Drunkard's Walkand coauthor of The Grand Design(with Stephen Hawking), gives us a startling and eye-opening examination of how the unconscious mind shapes our experience of the world and how, for instance, we often misperceive our relationships with family, friends, and business associates, misunderstand the reasons for our investment decisions, and misremember important events. Your preference in politicians, the amount you tip your waiter--all 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 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 subliminal mind affects the way we live. Employing his trademark wit and 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 and 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.
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What Hacker News says
- The verbal voice in your head is rationalizing. Don’t think. Just do.
(If you want a good resource that synthesizes a bunch of modern psychology research relating to that suggestion into a single, entertaining non-fiction book, see “Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior” by Leonard Mlodinow [0]).
[0]: https://psychcentralreviews.com/2016/subliminal-how-your-unc...
- Poor Economics - Abhijit Banerjee & Esther Duflo
Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
The Signal and The Noise - Nate Silver
Predictably Irrational - Dan Ariely
This Time is Different - Carmen Reinhart & Kenneth Rogoff
Subliminal - Leonard Mlodinow
Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Taleb
For something more lighthearted, I also enjoyed:
An Economist Gets Lunch - Tyler Cowen
Inside Jokes - Matthew Hurley & others (mostly skipped the dense parts)
- There's also a good book called Subliminal that discusses the neuroscience of how our subconcious brain make decisions that we often believe we made ourselves.
http://www.amazon.com/Subliminal-Your-Unconscious-Rules-Beha...
- Seems to run contrary to the concept of human memory being supremely unreliable, and that our subconscious has a tendency - beyond the feeling everyone's familiar with of memories being "vague" and "difficult to remember" - to actually edit and reshape the concrete details from the way they actually happened. Obviously, given a certain context, this can result in terrible consequences. I remember this being discussed at length in the book "Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior"[1] w/r/t eyewitness testimony of criminal acts, but perhaps in some cases, our distorted perception of reality may be a important mechanism to our own self-esteem, provided that it doesn't go too far.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Subliminal-Your-Unconscious-Rules-Beh...
- https://books.google.com/books?id=V7wt3Sqj_X8C&lpg=PP1&dq=su...
"Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior" By Leonard Mlodinow
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