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The Secret Life of the Mind: How Our Brain Thinks, Feels and Decides Hardcover – 1 Jun. 2017

4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 204 ratings

• Where do our thoughts come from?
• How can we manipulate our dreams?
• What is the role of the unconscious?
• How do we make choices and trust the judgement of both others and ourselves?

These are some of the questions answered in this groundbreaking, personal and comprehensive guide about our thoughts.

In this provocative, mind-bending international bestseller, prize-winning neuroscientist Mariano Sigman reveals his life’s work exploring the inner workings of the human brain.

Sigman's ambition is to explain the mind so that we can understand ourselves and others more deeply. He shows how we form ideas during our first days of life, how we give shape to our fundamental decisions, how we dream and imagine, why we feel certain emotions, how the brain transforms and how who we are changes with it. Sigman looks at the development of language, how bilingualism helps us to think and our notions of what is good and fair develop far earlier than we think.

Building on his awe-inspiring TED talk and spanning biology, physics, philosophy and medicine as well as gastronomy, magic, music, chess, literature and art, The Secret Life of the Mind revolutionizes how neuroscience serves us in our lives, revealing how the infinity of neurons inside our brains manufacture how we perceive, reason, feel, dream and communicate.

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Review

‘Sigman finds the sweet spot between findings and experimental detail, and it makes for a compelling read. Entertaining… with moments of exhileration’ Financial Times

‘Sigman provides vivid depictions of foundational behavioral psychology experiments…The book's exhaustive survey of experiments is, overall, enlightening, and Sigman's clear passion for neuroscience makes it easy to browse’ Science Magazine

‘Sigman is one of the many professors to become popularizers of their own fields… His book is peppered with brief stories and artistic allusions, and it moves quickly from idea to idea, study to study’ New York Times Book Review

‘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. He makes learning about the mind and brain easy and almost automatic. He is the Richard Feynman of the brain’
Andrew Meltzoff, Professor of Psychology, the University of Washington; co-author of ‘The Scientist in the Crib

‘The author takes us on grand tour covering an extraordinarily diverse range of topics that are of interest to readers and specialists alike’ VS Ramachandran FRCP, author of The Tell-Tale Brain

‘The brain is the star of this book, with chapters focussing on its characteristics throughout childhood and youth, identity, decision-making, consciousness, education and its capacity to transform itself. In exploring the psychological element of neuroscience, Mariano Sigman tells the story of the human mind as a journey through some of the least travelled paths of mankind … A wonderful read’ La Nacion

‘What differentiates The Secret Life of the Mind from other books about the mind is that it takes on neuroscience from a psychological point of view, as well as taking into account psychoanalysis, behavioural economics and philosophy’ Nosotras

About the Author

Mariano Sigman, a physicist by training, is an international leading figure in the cognitive neuroscience of learning and decision making. He is the founder of the Integrative Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Buenos Aires. Sigman is the only Latin American scientist to be a director of the Human Brain Project, was awarded a Human Frontiers Career Development Award, the National Prize of Physics, the Young Investigator Prize of "College de France," the IBM Scalable Data Analytics Award, and is a scholar of the James S. McDonnell Foundation. In 2016 he was made a Laureate of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ William Collins (1 Jun. 2017)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0008210926
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0008210922
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.9 x 2.7 x 24 cm
  • Customer reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 204 ratings

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4.6 out of 5 stars
204 global ratings

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Top reviews from United Kingdom

  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 August 2017
    If you are interested in psychological processes such as decision-making, remembering, learning and teaching, and in their neural underpinnings, then you should find this book both informative and entertaining. It contains some familiar material, but also some fresh findings and ideas that are stimulating and quite revolutionary. Apparently the text has been translated from Spanish to English, and the translator has done a wonderful job. The book is suitable for the interested layman and doesn't have an index, but professional academics are likely to find it useful and there is a comprehensive bibliography to aid further study.
    4 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 February 2019
    The book is an easy reading experience, Highly recommend!
  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 July 2018
    I found the chapters in this book of uneven interest.

    The first chapter, on pre-verbal children, I found of compelling interest - the case that such children are more rational and understand more than we have though, but just don't have impulse control is very persuasive and the experiments done with puppets and dolls to explore the moral thinking of children are fascinating. With children, clearly ostension is a better guide to their thinking than verbalisation, and following their gaze may be better yet.

    Other chapters I found a bit less interesting. I've come from reading recently the book How To Change Your Mind, so the chapter on psychedelics and other drugs was less interesting than it otherwise might have been (though interesting that the brains of long-term users of marijuana work different - not better, not worse by differently in some regards - from those of others is certainly worth holding onto). And the thoughts that we should trust our intuition when there are too many variables to think about a problem rationally and we should trust our bodies and our heartbeats when playing chess (they will tell us when we are about to make a mistake when our mind does not) are all interesting too...On learning the chapter is good, but I found the book call Peak, I think, by Anders Erikson just that bit more memorable on the same sort of topic (excelling at areas where performance can easily be judged is almost all down to practice and hours on the job, not natural talent)...

    So it's an easy read, and always interesting - but only sometimes for me was it truly compelling...
    One person found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 January 2018
    Oh my ! A great read !
  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 December 2017
    An outstanding work. Insightful and stimulating. An entertaining read too. Highly recommend.
  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 October 2022
    Good one

Top reviews from other countries

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  • Inverse-Aeon
    5.0 out of 5 stars Great book; easy to teach and understand
    Reviewed in Mexico on 20 October 2024
    Fascinating and great for teaching
  • Kindle Customer
    5.0 out of 5 stars Very insightful
    Reviewed in Brazil on 20 June 2020
    I really interesting explanation of the brain and the how we can all learn and practice and on the day life. when teaching others we are mastery our knowledge about this subject that is really interesting because there's no passive interaction and between humans beings. We are always teaching and learning when we are interacting with others...
  • Continental Op
    5.0 out of 5 stars Like the brain, a book of secret connections
    Reviewed in the United States on 28 June 2017
    This is not the standard walk through the facts of brain science that transits the hierarchy from molecules to brain in logical order. Rather, this book strikes me as an elaborate exercise based on the idea that talking about neuroscience is discussing a system that is trying to understand itself. The brain is the central entity that gives structure to reality, so this is the branch of science that is closest to a first-person perspective. Probably because of that, the topics presented are always punctuated by the author’s own peculiar intellectual itinerary and a disregard for traditional discipline boundaries, to the point that it is hard for moments to disentangle scientific knowledge from the collaborations and circumstances that generate it.

    In the end, the exposition benefits from the non-linear narrative, which allows the book to discover relationships between some concepts that as are relatively well known and many that don’t belong in more textbook-like readings. All of this comes seasoned with connections to philosophy, History or even chess or cooking, which I felt binds the contents and makes the book entertaining. Because of its peculiar nature, the stories here have something to offer to readers approaching brain science for the first time but also to those who think they have heard it all. Highly recommend!
  • MPB
    4.0 out of 5 stars Good book that resumes where we are now .
    Reviewed in France on 19 August 2017
    I like this book as it covers an interesting area...between psychology and physical mind functions .
    It seems to be a good summary of where things are today...objective but also clearly expressed opinion .
  • Karina Vieira
    5.0 out of 5 stars This is a great beautifully written book that illuminates the latest discoveries of ...
    Reviewed in the United States on 10 August 2017
    This is a great beautifully written book that illuminates the latest discoveries of Neuroscience in a very personal and anecdotical way. This thanks to the fact that the author is a well known researcher telling the story of his own discoveries and collaborations. One amazing example explaining the relationship between brain and mind is how very often the brain detects events before the minds is conscious of them. Only modern neuroscience and its technological improvements makes this possible. The book furthermore has a long discussion about learning in infants and bilingualism, which I was particularly fond of given that my toddler is learning 4 languages!