Nilesh Jasani's Reviews > Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

Subliminal attempts to shed light on the workings of the human mind, especially the part our conscious mind is unaware of. That our brain has hidden processes, methods, biases, decisions, etc., governing our behavior is well known for decades. The book's efforts to introduce them as something new will appeal only to those new to the subject.

As discussed best by Kahneman best, the human mind has a part that acts quickly without apparent awareness or step-by-step deliberation involvement and another part that reaches conclusions slowly after a lot of contemplation and analysis. The second part, however, is also influenced by abstruse environmental and internal factors that the author makes a part of his "subliminal" genre. Unfortunately, the idea is old and has been explored well in numerous bestselling behavioral science books.

The author presents several examples to illustrate his points. Some hidden influencers are in how our receptors/perceivers take in information, a few lurk in the imperfections of our memories and remembrances, and many are in our inscrutable processors. Ultimately, our actions as individuals and groups are frequently baffling and difficult to replicate even by our own selves in a different context. We give our idiosyncrasies terms like biases and blind spots in common languages. At the same time, behavioral fields have a more defined and refined long list to categorize them better for analytical purposes. The book is somewhere in between, more interested in unearthing non-rational behavior in broad strokes, which, as said before, will have utility for neophytes only.

As the book says, the field of neuroscience is a more exact science for understanding all this. Neuroscientists are making rapid progress in discovering the drivers of our quirks in the way our brains are wired and their intricate entanglements. However, the book's limited terminology related to a handful of parts of the brain does not do justice to the complexity of the human brain. The book simplifies neuroscience and presents it in a way that is easy to understand, but it does not add anything new.

One of the book's most significant shortcomings is its failure to discuss what laypeople can do to change our mind's strange ways. This is a missed opportunity, as practical advice here could have been beneficial.