In Mysteries of Mind – A Scientific Enquiry, Sunil Mishra adopts a multi-disciplinary approach to explore the vast depth of the human mind.
The vast depth of the human mind has intrigued scholars across disciplines since ancient times, and topics such as happiness, self and society, memory, love, language, free will and superstition have been approached from different lenses from then to now. A new book titled Mysteries of Mind – A Scientific Enquiry, penned by author and tech industry veteran Sunil Mishra, adopts a multi-disciplinary approach to the human mind.
With a foreword by Professor Debashish Chatterjee, Director, IIM Kozhikode, the book spans widely-discussed topics and attempts to answer questions such as why we procrastinate and do smartphones make our brain smart. It references the famous Stanford prison experiment, Sally Anne test, Turing test, and Einstein, Bohr and the war over quantum theory to explain these mysteries of the mind — mindfulness, procrastination, attention, emotions, illusion, the future of mind in an era of artificial intelligence, and more.
A 280-page book, published by Garuda Prakashan, is an inquiry from different disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, spirituality and neuroscience into the things that make us human, yet test the extent of our knowledge. These topics have been subject of wonder among people 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 to understand ourselves better and make the right decisions to leverage our potential.
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 life.
Neuroscientists, philosophers, spiritual gurus, psychologists and commoners like us, all have tried to understand it from their own perspective.
Sunil Mishra earned a B.Tech degree at IIT (ISM), Dhanbad and an MBA from IIM-Lucknow. He is the author of three other books.
“My attempt in this book has been to build a composite point of view based on references from latest scientific studies in various universities, as well as ancient literature on this topic,” said Sunil Mishra, who earned a B.Tech degree at IIT (ISM), Dhanbad and an MBA from IIM-Lucknow.
In the chapter ‘Fear of the Black Cat’, the author explains superstition in detail, citing psychological experiments, urban legends and karmic theory that try to explain what’s at play. He elaborates, “Pattern recognition has been essential for our survival, whether it was for identifying food or protecting ourselves from dangerous animals. A counter-effect of the same is that our brain does not handle randomness well. Hence, it tries to draw a pattern even among unrelated events.”
The author has over two decades of experience in the field of banking technology. He is working with Infosys in India in digital technologies, artificial intelligence, and start-up ecosystem. He had earlier worked with McKinsey, Accenture and I-flex solutions. He is the author of three other books.
