Summary of Leonard Mlodinow's Subliminal

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 My mother had a pet Russian tortoise named Miss Dinnerman. The tortoise lived in a large pen enclosing both shrubs and lawn, delineated by chicken wire. Miss Dinnerman’s main goal in life seemed to be escape. She would walk the perimeter, poking around for a hole in the chicken wire.
#2 It can be difficult to distinguish between willed, conscious behavior and that which is habitual or automatic. We often read consciousness into our own actions, and we do this with animals as well.
#3 We humans also perform many automatic, unconscious behaviors. We tend to be unaware of them, however, because the interplay between our conscious and our unconscious minds is so complex.
#4 My mother, who had been orphaned and sent to a labor camp when she was 16, had developed a skewed view of the world that remained unchanged for the rest of her life. She never recognized that her perceptions were skewed by the ever-present fear that justice, probability, and logic could cease to have force or meaning.

Sujets

• Business
• Economics
• Organizational studies
• Employabilité, métiers et formations
• Organizational Behavior

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 08 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822502437
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Leonard Mlodinow's Subliminal
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

My mother had a pet Russian tortoise named Miss Dinnerman. The tortoise lived in a large pen enclosing both shrubs and lawn, delineated by chicken wire. Miss Dinnerman’s main goal in life seemed to be escape. She would walk the perimeter, poking around for a hole in the chicken wire.

#2

It can be difficult to distinguish between willed, conscious behavior and that which is habitual or automatic. We often read consciousness into our own actions, and we do this with animals as well.

#3

We humans also perform many automatic, unconscious behaviors. We tend to be unaware of them, however, because the interplay between our conscious and our unconscious minds is so complex.

#4

My mother, who had been orphaned and sent to a labor camp when she was 16, had developed a skewed view of the world that remained unchanged for the rest of her life. She never recognized that her perceptions were skewed by the ever-present fear that justice, probability, and logic could cease to have force or meaning.

#5

The modern concept of the unconscious is based on studies and measurements of the brain, and it is now clear that many of our behaviors are governed by mental processes that we are unaware of.

#6

The idea that we are not aware of the cause of much of our behavior can be difficult to accept. However, the internal forces of the new unconscious have little to do with the innate drives described by Freud.

#7

The modern understanding of the unconscious is that it is a gift of evolution that is crucial to our survival as a species. It is a mechanism that helps us avoid snake bites and cars that swerve into our path, and it helps us navigate both the physical and social world.

#8

The most common surnames in the United States are Smith, Johnson, Williams, and Jones. People have a basic desire to feel good about themselves, and they are unconsciously biased in favor of traits similar to their own.

#9

The effects of environmental factors on how much we eat and how the food tastes is extremely powerful and unconscious. For example, people will tend to order the lyrically described foods, even if they don’t actually want them.

#10

The new unconscious is full of quirks in our judgment and perception of people and events, which arise from the usually beneficial ways in which our brains process information.

#11

Our judgments are often influenced by irrelevant factors, which traditional economists ignore. In a study of how people choose detergents, subjects overwhelmingly chose the box with mixed colors, despite the fact that the detergents were all identical.

#12

The same is true for wine, even though people like to believe it’s all in the grapes and the winemaker’s expertise. Studies have shown that when wines are tasted blind, there is little correlation between a wine’s taste and its cost, but when the wines are not sampled blind, there is a strong correlation between a wine’s cost and its taste.

#13

Our brains are not just recording experiences, but are also creating them. We would like to think that when we choose a laptop or a laundry detergent, we have made a conscious choice based on taste, caloric content, price, our mood, the principle that guacamole should not contain mayonnaise, or any of a hundred other factors under our control.

#14

The influence of the unconscious is felt in financial markets as well. For instance, if you were debating whether to invest in a stock, you would probably take a look at the industry, the business climate, and the financial details of a company before deciding if you should put your money behind it.

#15

There are many factors that affect stock performance, and some of them are irrelevant to finance. For example, sunshine has a positive effect on human behavior. And yet, the trading patterns of agents in New York City have a significant effect on overall New York Stock Exchange performance.

#16

We make personal, financial, and business decisions, confident that we have weighed all the important factors and acted accordingly. But we are only aware of our conscious influences, and so our view of ourselves and society is limited.

#17

The distinction between the conscious and the unconscious has been made in one form or another since the time of the Greeks. The modern perspective is that the mind’s general features, such as biases arising from desires, needs, and past experiences, contribute to the formation of perceptions.

#18

The field of psychology was developed by the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt in 1879, and the American philosopher and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce in 1878. The field of psychology was developed to study the mind, and it was through experimental work that it was put on a scientific footing.

#19

The human mind is more complex than Carpenter’s original picture. It is the unconscious that is the more fundamental. It developed early in our evolution to deal with the basic necessities of function and survival.

#20

The unconscious mind is what allows us to survive in a world requiring such massive information intake and processing. It is what allows us to make sense of simple speech, and it is what dominates our mental activity regardless of whether our conscious minds are idle or engaged.

#21

The human brain is divided into two cerebral hemispheres, which are almost mirror images of each other.