Sunday, April 14, 2019

Exploring How Your Subconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

By Maria Fox


Applied and behavioral psychologists have known for quite some time that behavior can be shaped by personal experiences and the environment. While this is the case, a new book by Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Subconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior claims that behavior is most often ruled by the subconscious aspects of the mind. In the book, the author uses a combination of math, physics and scientific fact to prove this to be the case.

Known as a self-help author, theoretical physicist and recognized for groundbreaking discoveries, Mlodinow has a passion for making science and scientific fast interesting and available to society at large. In addition to being a student at University of California Berkeley, the author was also on the faculty at the California Institute of Technology. Leonard has released five books which have been on the New York best sellers list, two of which were co-authored with Deepak Chopra and Stephen Hawking.

Leonard has also been featured in a number of webzines, magazines, newspapers and has lectured around the world. In addition, the author has appeared on cable, satellite and television programs such as ABC's Nightline in which he debated Deepak Chopra, Through the Wormhole, Morning Joe and others over the course of what has become a long career. In addition to writing about physics and science, Mlodinow has also written for television series including MacGuyver and Star Trek The Next Generation.

Although Leonard's parents were both Holocaust survivors, the couple did not meet and marry until 1948 in New York. After which, Leonard was born in 1954. Still, as Leonard's father was in a concentration camp, and mother in a labor camp, life was not was always for Leonard as a child.

Leonard initially attended Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Although, Mlodinow dropped out in 1972 to travel to Israel on a work kibbutz. During that time, Leonard fell in love with physics after reading several books by Richard Feyman. At the time, the books were the only English books housed at the kibbutz library.

Upon returning home from Israel, Leonard added physics to a double major of chemistry and math and began work towards a doctoral degree in physics at University California Berkeley. In the process, Mlodinow in preparing a final thesis, worked with Nikos Papanicolaou to develop a new application for problem solving in infinite dimensions. After which, the two discovered that corrections were necessary in order to prove that the world in which humans live is a three dimensional one.

Upon leaving Berkeley, Mlodinow obtained a faculty position at California Institute of Technology. While still at Caltech, Mlodinow became a Research Fellow in theoretical physics. In fact, this fellowship most likely led Leonard to Germany where a second fellowship was awarded from the the Max-Planck-Institute for Physics and Astrophysics.

In 2005, the author and physicist came full circle and returned to the California Institute of Technology faculty as a teacher. Mlodinow continued to write books while teaching physics until 2013, then once again left the university to write on a full time basis. Since that time, and the release of Subliminal, Leonard has gone on to write The Upright Thinkers: the human journey from living in trees to understanding the universe in 2015 and Elastic: flexible thinking in a time of change in 2018.




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