Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior
by Leonard Mlodinow
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Author presents live in TEDx format + slides
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Spoiler:
The author discusses the relatively new field of social neuroscience, which is a combination of three fields: social psychology, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. Since neuroscience can show which parts of our brains are functioning as we have certain thoughts and feelings and make decisions, it has turned psychology from a soft science to a hard science, allowing us to connect brain structures and mechanisms to a patient’s behavior. The author uses slides to show the audience how the subconscious influences visual processing and how physical appearance influences decisions like voting.
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Author uses audience participation to discuss the unconscious mind
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Spoiler:
Saying that we often don’t understand what influences us in our daily lives, the author demonstrates to the audience several ways in which our unconscious minds direct decisions that we think are conscious. He clarifies that the unconscious mind he’s talking about is not that of Freud and is not emotional; rather, he is referring to parts of the brain that are inherently inaccessible to the conscious mind. He uses slides to demonstrate that attention is a critical part of our vision when perceiving the world.
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Key concepts from the book described in animated format
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Spoiler:
Although we would love to think that we are making daily decisions based on logic, reason, and our own personal ethics, the author argues that there are a lot of things happening under the surface that influence our behavior. Evolution did not design our brain to understand itself; it designed our brain to survive. For that reason we tend to overestimate our abilities, be blind to our own faults and problems while clearly seeing defects in others, and to underestimate our weaknesses.
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