How do babies think and communicate? How is consciousness born in the brain and how does it govern the unconscious? What happens in the brain during dreams? What makes the brain more or less predisposed to change? How can you learn and teach better? Is it better to trust reason or hunches when making decisions? Why is it believed that learning a new language is much more difficult for an adult than for a child? All these questions are compiled in the best-selling work at the International Book Fair, according to Penguin Random House: “The secret life of the mind”, by Mariano Sigman, a passionate about neuroscience and experimental psychology, who in search of answers Download all those ideas in a text to contribute to human development.
For the Argentine author, it is a journey to the depths of the human brain, in which he goes through all the recesses of the mind to understand what defines identity, how ideas are forged in the first days of life.
“When I arrived at FILBo I realized that it has been the best seller at the fair. This has been very important to me and I think it is achieved because people are in search of answers, of everything that is human thought and not only in Colombia, but it has also connected in other countries, such as Argentina and Spain ” , Mariano Sigman told EL NUEVO SIGLO.
He is also passionate about experimentation and has worked with magicians, chefs, chess players, musicians, athletes and plastic artists to bring together the knowledge of neuroscience in different aspects of human culture and be able to apply it in different environments.
He has participated twice (2016 and 2017) in the global TED event in Vancouver, the second time together with Dan Ariely.
In his conferences he has taught how the mind works and what lessons can be drawn to impact aspects such as decision-making, leadership, team management, personal development or creative skills, always with high audience participation through of experiments and games.
International referent
Many say that he is a brilliant mind. He earned his PhD in neuroscience in New York and was a researcher in Paris before returning to Argentina. Without a doubt, he is a world leader in the neuroscience of decisions, in neuroscience and education, and in the neuroscience of human communication. He is one of the directors of the Human Brain Project, the most important initiative to understand and emulate this organ. To this day he is a reference in the neuroscience of decisions, human communication and education. An extensive experience that has led him to understand that the brain is more malleable than previously thought and depends on words to change it, as he defends in “The power of words.”
In addition, he has an extensive career in scientific dissemination that includes columns on the main radio stations in Argentina, television programs and hundreds of articles published in different editorial media around the world.
“It is a book that deals with the questions that challenge us a bit, it has those things that we want to change, that have to do with emotions, for example, some of us are more jealous, others are very scared, there are those who they get very angry It is a bit to see how we react, each person has different aspects of life that one wonders: how can we do to change those things that really matter to us?, and the book is about that, to find tools in neuroscience that they help us on this journey so that each one can find a life that is more harmonious and that is more like the one we want to have”, he refers.
Sigman, who fled Argentina with his family at the age of three after the military coup, lived his childhood and part of his adolescence in Barcelona and now lives in Madrid, where he has become the protagonist of his own experiments. The last one: learning music and editing a record. In his book, he claims that words can solve social problems and improve people’s lives.
Dialogue as an option
The author affirms that to achieve this dialogue, the first step is to convince people to sit down and talk, because it works, but for that there are some essential keys: Number one, talk among a few. “It’s very simple, but you can’t talk to 500 people at the same time, you can’t solve a problem in your life among 850 people. Simple as that, three or four people. My experience leads me to share with everyone a lot of things that people would like to change, the book precisely allows us to improve because it also maintains a humorous tone, friendly with a serious tinge, but sometimes close, and in that laboratory we ask ourselves so many questions that I like to think that those are the questions that we all ask ourselves and we all look for answers”, he expresses.
“In the book I tell which emotions are easier to change. Also, it helps us a lot to laugh at them or think about them in the third person. Talk to someone about the reasons or why we feel afraid. We have to inquire into our life and ask ourselves curiously. We must observe ourselves more. This has to do with appreciating the diversity of the repertoire beyond the almost automatic reflex of cataloging emotions as good or bad”, she highlights.
But the novelty of his work is that through a series of experiments and studies, Sigman deciphers the keys that make a conversation (with oneself or with others) truly effective for all kinds of objectives: from resolving interpersonal conflicts to overcome psychological and cognitive barriers that prevent us from advancing as humanity.