Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

Subliminal is a popular account of cognitive and social psychology by the physicist Leonard Mlodinow, arguing that much of what drives perception, memory and judgment happens outside conscious awareness.

Pantheon published the hardcover in 2012, at 260 pages. The chapters move from the brain's two tiers and the new science of the unconscious to how the senses and the mind together build a picture of reality, how memory works and fails, and how people read one another in social life. The book won the 2013 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and Vintage issued a 272-page paperback in February 2013.

Mlodinow holds a PhD in theoretical physics from UC Berkeley and taught at Caltech. He co-wrote The Grand Design and A Briefer History of Time with Stephen Hawking, and the cover of this book names his earlier bestseller The Drunkard's Walk. Subliminal applies the same explanatory habit to psychology.