AUDIOBOOK
About
Where do our thoughts come from? How do we make choices and trust our judgments? What is the role of the unconscious? Can we manipulate our dreams? In this mind-bending international bestseller, award-winning neuroscientist Mariano Sigman explores the complex answers to these and many other age-old questions. Drawing on research in physics, linguistics, psychology, education, and more, Dr. Sigman explains why people who speak more than one language are less prone to dementia, how infants can recognize by sight objects they've previously only touched, how babies - even before they utter their first word - have an innate sense of right and wrong, and how we can read the thoughts of vegetative patients by decoding patterns in their brain activity. The cutting-edge research presented in The Secret Life of the Mind revolutionizes how we understand the role that neuroscience plays in our lives, unlocking the mysterious cerebral processes that control the ways in which we learn, reason, fee l, think, and dream.
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Reviews
"Every year 20,000 papers are presented at the annual meeting of the society for neuroscience yet we don't have tentative answers to even 'simple' questions, such as why we sing, laugh, dance, or cry -- let alone the lofty question of how a pack of neurons gives rise to consciousness and sense of self. Amidst the din and chaos of empirical data that threatens to deluge us, it is refreshing to see
V. S. Ramachandran, author of The Tell-Tale Brain
"If, as the poetess Emily Dickinson wrote, 'the brain is deeper than the sea,' then Mariano Sigman's book is the perfect travel guide to those uncharted abysses. Concise, pithy, sprinkled with illuminating metaphors, this book takes you on a most entertaining journey into the subtleties and oddities of the human mind. This trip into ourselves is rewarded with many insights into such ill-known conc
Stanislas Dehaene, author of Consciousness and the Brain
"Mariano Sigman writes and thinks in a uniquely provocative way. He is a gifted cognitive neuroscientist, and we are lucky to have him excavating the secret life of the mind. You will not be able to resist his analogies, which are always deeply informative and often amusing. He makes learning about the mind and brain easy and almost automatic. He is the Richard Feynman of the brain."
Andrew Meltzoff, co-author of The Scientist in the Crib