Thursday 22 November 2012

Subliminal by Daniel Mlodinow

subliminal


For those exploring for the first time the intricacies of our conscious and un-conscious selves this will undoubtedly be an exciting book, as a number of other reviews testify.  Mlodinow writes clearly and with a lightness of  touch that manages to get some pretty profound concepts across in an interesting and intriguing way. 

There are of course a number of contemporary books charting the same territory at the moment- Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow comes to mind, which I actually think is a bit over-rated but that's another issue- but it has of course all been said many years before now, notably by P.D. Ouspensky early in the twentieth century in The Fourth Way, a book still in print and worth having a luxurious dive into if any one feels stimulated by the ideas sketched out in this book.  Because it is an illusion that we have have only one 'I'- there a number of competing 'I's' in our brain, and our consciousness is far from what it seems...

So Mlodinow has made a fair stab at bring these ideas to a wider audience although it is more of a primer than anything else, though non the worse for that.

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