wayfaring_witch's review against another edition
4.0
Interesting exploration of the unconscious mind!
sara_mae14's review against another edition
5.0
This was an easy 5-stars for me. I’m not normally a science person, so I appreciated the humorous anecdotes and touching family stories that rounded out the dozens of research studies. It makes you reconsider everything you see, remember, think, and feel, but not in a cynical way. I will be recommending it to everyone I know for forever.
Also, the end made me tear up a little bit, and I definitely didn’t see that coming.
Also, the end made me tear up a little bit, and I definitely didn’t see that coming.
capshaw's review against another edition
5.0
Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior is the sort of book that made me stop every few paragraphs and consider how the topics presented in the book related to my life. It’s a broad, high-level, introduction to the unconscious and how it affects our day-to-day perceptions of events, other people, and ourselves.
Because of the broad structure, I often found myself wishing that Mlodinow had written in more detail about particularly experiments that I found interesting. Luckily, there are endnotes with references to the studies to explore in more detail if you wish. On the other hand, I found the paragraphs on the history of the study of the unconscious less interesting and skimmed those fairly regularly.
Especially interesting to me were the chapters that touched on implications that the unconscious has on group behavior (Chapter 8: In-Groups and Out-Groups) and our perception of our self (Chapter 10: Self). In these later chapters, Mlodinow did a good job tying together experiments, the concepts behind the experiments and the implications that they have on our day-to-day life.
Overall, I would highly recommend reading Subliminal.
Because of the broad structure, I often found myself wishing that Mlodinow had written in more detail about particularly experiments that I found interesting. Luckily, there are endnotes with references to the studies to explore in more detail if you wish. On the other hand, I found the paragraphs on the history of the study of the unconscious less interesting and skimmed those fairly regularly.
Especially interesting to me were the chapters that touched on implications that the unconscious has on group behavior (Chapter 8: In-Groups and Out-Groups) and our perception of our self (Chapter 10: Self). In these later chapters, Mlodinow did a good job tying together experiments, the concepts behind the experiments and the implications that they have on our day-to-day life.
Overall, I would highly recommend reading Subliminal.
jonbarrywolf's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
mysterious
medium-paced
4.25