Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Secret Life of the Mind: How Our Brain Thinks, Feels and Decides
    Unavailable
    The Secret Life of the Mind: How Our Brain Thinks, Feels and Decides
    Unavailable
    The Secret Life of the Mind: How Our Brain Thinks, Feels and Decides
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Secret Life of the Mind: How Our Brain Thinks, Feels and Decides

    Written by Mariano Sigman

    Narrated by Peter Noble

    4/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    • 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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateJun 1, 2017
    ISBN9780008210946
    Unavailable
    The Secret Life of the Mind: How Our Brain Thinks, Feels and Decides

    Related to The Secret Life of the Mind

    Related audiobooks

    Science & Mathematics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Hardwired For Novelty

      Apr 10, 2022

      Hardwired For Novelty
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Land Of Distraction

      Mar 1, 2023

      The Land Of Distraction
      6 min read

    • Article

      Metaphors Are Us: War, murder, music, art. We would have none without metaphor.

      Apr 29, 2013

      The other day I fixed something—a rarity for me. The flotation device in the toilet water tank was rubbing against the side, getting stuck halfway up so that the tank didn’t fill completely. I own a hammer and know how to operate it. But I couldn’t f

      9 min read

    • Article

      Metaphors Are Us

      Sep 5, 2019

      The other day I fixed something—a rarity for me. The flotation device in the toilet water tank was rubbing against the side, getting stuck halfway up so that the tank didn’t fill completely. I own a hammer and know how to operate it. But I couldn’t f

      9 min read

    • Article

      Consciousness Isn’t Self-Centered

      Feb 27, 2020

      The great mystery of consciousness is why matter lights up with felt experience. After all, we are composed of particles indistinguishable from those swirling around in the sun; the atoms that compose your body were once the ingredients of countless

      10 min read

    • Article

      Outsourced Memories

      Dec 25, 2023

      Outsourced Memories
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Reality of Color Is Perception: An argument for a new definition of color.

      Jul 23, 2015

      Philosophers have a bad reputation for casting unwarranted doubt on established facts. Little could be more certain than your belief that the cloudless sky, on a summer afternoon, is blue. Yet we may wonder in earnest, is it also blue for the birds w

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Reality of Color Is Perception

      Jan 11, 2018

      Philosophers have a bad reputation for casting unwarranted doubt on established facts. Little could be more certain than your belief that the cloudless sky, on a summer afternoon, is blue. Yet we may wonder in earnest, is it also blue for the birds w

      7 min read

    • Article

      Changing Your Mind

      Aug 27, 2023

      by Robin McConnell On a spring paddock hill, dismembered by dusk, the broad shouldered boy is reading Keats. While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day and touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue. The rim of farm light flecks hayseeds Luminescent

      3 min read

    • Article

      Why Doesn’t Ancient Fiction Talk About Feelings?

      Oct 18, 2018

      Reading medieval literature, it’s hard not to be impressed with how much the characters get done—as when we read about King Harold doing battle in one of the Sagas of the Icelanders, written in about 1230. The first sentence bristles with purposeful

      12 min read

    • Article

      Why Doesn’t Ancient Fiction Talk About Feelings?

      Apr 27, 2017

      Reading medieval literature, it’s hard not to be impressed with how much the characters get done—as when we read about King Harold doing battle in one of the Sagas of the Icelanders, written in about 1230. The first sentence bristles with purposeful

      12 min read

    • Article

      The Girl Who Smelled Pink

      Mar 15, 2018

      My tongue is orange!” my 2-year-old daughter shrieked after licking a dollop of clear hand sanitizer. More orange experiences followed. “Mommy, my ear feels orange,” she moaned when an earache struck. “Mitten off! It’s orange,” she whined from inside

      9 min read

    • Article

      The Girl Who Smelled Pink: A mother wonders if we are all born with synesthesia.

      Jul 9, 2015

      My tongue is orange!” my 2-year-old daughter shrieked after licking a dollop of clear hand sanitizer. More orange experiences followed. “Mommy, my ear feels orange,” she moaned when an earache struck. “Mitten off! It’s orange,” she whined from inside

      9 min read

    • Article

      Kim Beom

      Nov 2, 2023

      Kim Beom
      9 min read

    • Article

      From The Editor-in-chief

      Oct 10, 2018

      You can learn a lot at bedtime. As you crawl under covers, as the mattress supports your body, as the pillow caresses your head, the cares of the day fall away and in that free space things are said. Things that would be crushed by the bright busy-ne

      2 min read

    • Article

      Consciousness Is Just a Feeling

      Mar 3, 2021

      When he was a boy, Mark Solms obsessed over big existential questions. What happens when I die? What makes me who I am? He went on to study neuroscience but soon discovered that neuropsychology had no patience for such open-ended questions about the

      12 min read

    • Article

      For Kids, Learning Is Moving: Children’s brain development is fueled when they find their own way.

      Sep 22, 2016

      When Jon was born prematurely at 26 weeks, he weighed around two pounds and had trouble breathing on his own. For two months he lived in an incubator and eventually grew into a healthy baby and toddler. At age 4, he had two epileptic seizures. About

      12 min read

    • Article

      Lost And Found: Bewilderment As An Invitation To Transformation

      Nov 10, 2021

      — When I get lost while driving in the Hudson Valley — which is often — I usually welcome seeing a new place. When one of my two young daughters asks me a thought-stopping question (“Papa, are we indigenous people anywhere on the planet?” “Papa, do o

      8 min read

    • Article

      WHY WE TALK to Ourselves

      Oct 18, 2022

      WHY WE TALK to Ourselves
      6 min read

    • Article

      Luminous Darkness: A Radical Path to Embracing the Unknown

      Aug 18, 2022

      Estimated reading time: 9 minutes — So many of us have been taught to fear the dark, the unknown, the unwanted, the unfamiliar. When the terrain we’re standing on feels unstable or wobbly, our conditioned tendency is to try to get back to seemingly

      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Secret Life of the Mind

    4/5

    30 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      I loved this book, it is one the first I had have read on Scribd. Learned a lot and inspired me to keep reading books alike.
    • 4/5
      This is another fascinating look at the development and workings of the human brain. Sigman begins by looking at the brains of babies and toddlers, that period of life we all go through, and yet have few if any memories of. We tend to think of babies' brains as very simple, but there is in fact a lot of complex activity going on inside those little heads. Babies, by the time they are five months old, can respond to puppet shows that show puppets that help another puppet, and puppets that show another puppet that refuses to help. When offered a choice between the helpful puppet and the unhelpful puppet, the babies prefer the helpful puppet. That's an oversimplified description, but children as young as five months can already choose, and express the choice, for kinder, more helpful behavior. There are other experiments described here that show more complex moral choices babies and very young children are able to make.Children also learn language more readily than we might expect, including learning multiple languages. Being raised bilingual slows correct language acquisition a little bit initially, but overall become better at both languages--and more flexible in their approach to solving problems that have no connection to linguistics. And if the particular problem is one where emotion is getting in the way, switching to their second language enables them to be more objective and analytical.Oh, and people who are fluent in two or more languages appear to be less likely to develop dementia. So, think about that the next time you're deciding how you feel about your young children learning from their other parent or your in-laws a language you don't speak and don't think you want to learn. It's good for your kids' long-term health, and learning with them might be good for you, too.Later sections of the book address how we make decisions, what consciousness is for, and the malleability and flexibility of the brain. Emotion is important to making rational, constructive decisions; one famous example of this is the case of Phineas Gage, an American railroad construction engineer, who in the course of working with explosives received a steel spike through his brain. It destroyed much of his left frontal lobe, and he unexpectedly survived. However, the previously capable, responsible, reliable man who had been like and respected by those he worked with, became profane, unreliable, and obnoxious. His intellect didn't seem to have suffered, but his behavior certainly had. He was said to be "no longer Gage," lost his job, and moved on.Yet in the years after the accident, he eventually recovered the faculties and normal behavior that had made him liked and respected before the accident. He's important to the development of our understanding of localization of functions in the brain. He's also a documented example of the brain essentially rewiring itself, to regain functions lost to brain damage.Sigman also discusses success in establishing very basic communication with "vegetative" patients. It is now possible to learn to read brain activity in at least some of these patients, and create a basic yes/no communication system. This is very long way from direct, complex, flexible communication, but it's a start, and very interesting.He also discusses how our growing understanding of neurology can possibly help us develop more effective educational practices for our schools.Overall, this is an interesting and readable/listenable book on the brain, and well worth your time.Recommended.I bought this audiobook.