From the best-selling author of The Drunkard's Walkand coauthor of The Grand Design(with Stephen Hawking) and War of the Worldviews(with Deepak Chopra) comes a fascinating, illuminating examination of the profound ways in which the unconscious mind shapes our lives. Every aspect of our mental lives plays out in two versions: one conscious, which we are constantly aware of, and the other unconscious, which remains hidden from us. Over the past two decades researchers have developed remarkable new tools for probing the unconscious, or subliminal, workings of the mind. This explosion of research has led to a sea change in our understanding of how the mind affects the way we live. As a result, scientists are becoming increasingly convinced that how we experience the world--our perception, behavior, memory, and social judgment--is largely driven by the mind's subliminal processes and not by the conscious ones, as we have long believed. Employing his trademark lucid, accessible explanations of the most obscure scientific subjects, Leonard Mlodinow unravels the complexities of the subliminal mind and reveals its influence on how we act with friends and strangers, spouses and coworkers. Like The Drunkard's Walk, Subliminalwill increase our understanding of how the human mind works, and will change our view of ourselves, of the world around us, and of how we interact with that world. From the Hardcover edition.