How Your Subconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

By Maria Fox


While behavioral and applied psychology has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that environment and surroundings can effect behavior, there is a new book which proves behavior can be based on the subconscious. Subliminal: how your subconscious mind rules your behavior, written by Leonard Mlodinow, a theoretical physicist, is the first book to examine this new discovery in the field of psychology.

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.

A child of Holocaust survivors, including a mother whom was housed in a labor camp and a father whom was imprisoned in a concentration camp, life has not always been easy for the author. While Mlodinow's parents never knew one another until after the Holocaust, the two met in Brooklyn, New York in 1948, after which the couple were married, then had Leonard in 1954.

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.

Following the work kibbutz, Leonard returned to Massachusetts and added physics to what was already a double major of chemistry and math at Brandeis. After grading in 1976 with a Bachelors of Science, Mlodinow went on to a acquire a Masters, then a Ph. D in theoretical physics from University of California at Berkeley. While working on a doctoral thesis, Leonard worked with Nikos Papanicolaou on new methods for problem solving in infinite dimensions.

Upon graduating from Berkeley, Mlodinow acquired a faculty position at Caltech, becoming a Bantrell Fellow in theoretical physics. It is most likely that fellowship which resulted in Leonard's traveling to Germany, where the young author and physicist attended the Max-Planck-Institute for Physics and Astrophysics. While at the institute, Mlodinow received a second fellowship, becoming an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow before returning home to America in 2005.

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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