The only thing I really disliked was Shtulman’s suggestion that the 10 percent myth is just a “typo of the mind,” akin to a trivial factual error that does not betray a scientific misconception. I’m not so sure. Some of these typos are so easy to miss, and so easy to pass on from person to person, that they must reflect a deeper bias in the way we understand ourselves.

THE SECRET LIFE OF THE MIND

How Your Brain Thinks, Feels, and Decides

By Mariano Sigman

277 pp. Little, Brown. $27.

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Sigman’s book is as much about the workings of the brain as it is about the mind. His idiosyncratic tour — “a summary of neuroscience from the perspective of my own experience” — starts with the mind of the child, then moves to the brain circuits involved in decision making and alights on consciousness, before ending with learning and formal education. One interesting section describes what researchers can now do with brain imaging technology to make better guesses about what pictures people are watching, memories they are recalling, or even what dreams they are having. This is not just a neuroscientist’s parlor trick: It’s an essential way of figuring out the codes the brain uses to represent information and knowledge.

Sigman is one of many professors to become popularizers of their own fields, rather than leave the explanation and interpretation to science writers. His book is peppered with brief stories and artistic allusions, and it moves quickly from idea to idea, study to study. But I found myself wishing he more deeply described the experiments he mentions and some of the nuances about their proper interpretation. Readers of science books are interested in the concrete details of how it all gets done as well as what it really means.