Leonard Mlodinow: Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

Point of Inquiry, the flagship podcast of the Center for Inquiry, relaunches with a special episode recorded before a live audience at the 2013 CFI Summit in Tacoma, Washington, with new co-host Josh Zepps of HuffPost Live.Our unconscious minds offer us something of a paradox. On the one hand, we'd be lost without it, as it processes information without us ever being aware of it — it's how we deal with the real world in real time. But on the other hand, we don't always have a complete picture, so the unconscious mind can often draw mistaken conclusions, even though they may feel right at a "gut level."This is the subject of the work of Leonard Mlodinow in his most recent book Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, for which he won the 2013 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award for a book of literary nonfiction on the subject of the physical or biological sciences. In this interview, Mlodinow explains how we have trouble poking holes in our own suppositions.Leonard Mlondinow is a physicist, author, and screenwriter best known for coauthoring (with Stephen Hawking) the New York Times number-one best seller The Grand Design and the international best seller A Briefer History of Time, as well as The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, a New York Times notable book of the year.Next week we'll bring you another episode from the CFI Summit, as our second new co-host, journalist Lindsey Beyerstein, interviews Katherine Stewart, author of The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children.Copyright 2013