Mysteries of Mind: A Scientific Enquiry

We use our minds constantly and understand them barely at all. Sunil Mishra's Mysteries of Mind works across philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and Vedic thought to examine the things that make us distinctly human — memory, love, attention, free will, the tendency toward superstition, the habit of procrastination, the nature of emotion — and asks why, despite millennia of inquiry, so much of this territory remains unmapped.

Mishra structures the book around a core problem: the mind and body operate in different domains, speak different languages, and yet life only happens when they come together. The experiments he draws on — from neuroscience and cognitive psychology — are anchored in stories of real human behaviour, which keeps the scientific material from floating free of lived experience. His aim throughout is practical as much as theoretical: understanding how the mind actually works creates the conditions for using it better.

From the ancient Vedic civilisation to contemporary cognitive science, the questions the book returns to are the same ones humans have always circled. What makes this treatment different is its refusal to stay in any single discipline long enough to mistake the map for the territory.