Are you a rational person? Do you think through your decisions carefully? If you answered yes, Irish psychotherapist David Kavanagh reckons you’re kidding yourself – particularly when it comes to sex and relationships.

Kavanagh’s book, Love Rewired, looks at how our unconscious minds motivate us in ways that seem counterintuitive. For example, a man surrounded by women looks like a good sexual prospect to many straight women, whereas the opposite is true for heterosexual men. Love Rewired examines how new findings in neuroscience have changed our understand of the brain, and the book is full of quirky tidbits on how our brains work, and how they sometimes undermine us.

Kavanagh also offers suggestions about how neuroscientific insights can be practically applied to get the best out of our relationships. Neuroscience may be a dense subject matter, but Love Rewired is as chatty as it is informative.