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How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives
Spiegel & Grau
January 2010
On Sale: January 19, 2010
288 pages
ISBN: 0385525214
EAN: 9780385525213
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The hidden brain is Shankar Vedantam’s shorthand for a host
of brain functions, emotional responses, and cognitive
processes that happen outside of our conscious awareness,
but that have a decisive effect on how we behave. The
hidden brain has its finger on the scale when we make all of
our most complex and important decisions – it decides who we
fall in love with, whether we should convict someone of
murder, or which way to run when someone yells “fire!” It
explains why we can become riveted by the story of a single
puppy adrift on an ocean but are quickly bored by a story of
genocide. The hidden brain can also be deliberately
manipulated to vote against their interest, or even become
suicide terrorists. But the most disturbing thing is that
it does all of this without our knowing.
Shankar Vedantam, longtime author of the Washington Post’s
popular “Department of Human Behavior” column, takes us on a
tour of this phenomenon and explores its consequences.
Using original reporting that combines the latest scientific
research with compulsively readable narratives that take
readers from the American campaign trail to terrorist
indoctrination camps, from the World Trade Center on 9/11
to, yes, a puppy adrift in the Pacific Ocean, Vedantam
illuminates the dark recesses of our minds while making an
original argument about how we can compensate for our blind
spots—and what happens when we don't.
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