MITCASA Book Club – July (San Antonio)
MITCASA has a book club in San Antonio. We focus on popular STEM non-fiction or hard-science science fiction (not hard to read, but science-oriented) that will fit into our busy lives (no textbooks, Ph.D. theses, or thousand-page novels). We can choose other subjects, too. Each month, we’ll choose books for the following month by consensus.
The fifteenth meeting will be on Monday, July 21, 2025, from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM. We’ll meet at Rome’s Pizza at 5999 De Zavala Road, San Antonio, TX 78249. Rome’s Pizza has counter service featuring salad’s, pasta, sandwiches, desserts, and … wait for it … pizza.
This month’s book is The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives by Shankar Vedantam. It is available from Amazon in Kindle, audiobook, paperback, and hardcover form. It is also available from the San Antonio Public Library in audiobook and book form.
From the Amazon description:
The hidden brain is the voice in our ear when we make the most important decisions in our lives—but we’re never aware of it. The hidden brain decides whom we fall in love with and whom we hate. It tells us to vote for the white candidate and convict the dark-skinned defendant, to hire the thin woman but pay her less than the man doing the same job. It can direct us to safety when disaster strikes and move us to extraordinary acts of altruism. But it can also be manipulated to turn an ordinary person into a suicide terrorist or a group of bystanders into a mob.
In a series of compulsively readable narratives, Shankar Vedantam journeys through the latest discoveries in neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science to uncover the darkest corner of our minds and its decisive impact on the choices we make as individuals and as a society. Filled with fascinating characters, dramatic storytelling, and cutting-edge science, this is an engrossing exploration of the secrets our brains keep from us—and how they are revealed.
