Professor Paul Bloom’s Introduction to Psychology is one of Yale’s most popular courses of all time. In his new book, Psych: The Story of the Human Mind, his eighth, he provides readers a tour of that course and of many of the ideas he’s developed over his career as a research psychologist, with plenty of well-placed anecdotes and quotations from great thinkers and philosophers throughout history to reinforce his teaching points.

The book gets off to a scientific start as he explores the more complicated neurological processes involved in human thought (the role of neurons and neurotransmitters, for example). From there, it’s on to a brief look at the human brain and the “science of consciousness” and the unconscious.