The vast depth of the human mind has intrigued scholars across disciplines since ancient times, and topics such as happiness, the self and society, memory, love, language, free will, and superstition have been approached from different lenses from then to now.
Blending these approaches, a new book titled Mysteries of Mind: A Scientific Enquiry, penned by author and tech industry veteran Sunil Mishra, takes a non-fiction and multi-disciplinary approach to the human mind.
With a foreword by Professor Debashish Chatterjee, Director, IIM Kozhikode, the book published by Garuda Prakashan spans widely-discussed topics in chapters, attempting to answer questions such as why we procrastinate and do smartphones make our brain smart.
It references the famous Stanford prison experiment, the Sally Ann test, the Turing test, Einstein, Bohr, and the war over quantum theory to explain these mysteries of the mind: mindfulness, procrastination, attention, emotions, illusion, the future of the mind in an era of artificial intelligence, and more.
Mysteries of Mind is an enquiry from different disciplines like philosophy, psychology, spirituality, and neuroscience into things that make us human, yet test the extent of our knowledge. These topics have been subjects of wondering and pondering from the ancient Vedic civilisation to the modern computer age.
The book has stories of human minds, interesting psychological experiments, and underlying scientific explanations from neuroscientists. All these incidents and experiments help us understand ourselves better and make the right decisions to leverage our potential mindfully.
Even for advanced medical science, the mind is a very nebulous topic; it is elusive. It is not governed by the natural laws of physics or biology. Yet, we all know that the mind exists because we all experience it in our day-to-day lives. Neuroscientists, philosophers, spiritual gurus, psychologists, and commoners like us, all tried to understand it from their own perspectives.