The Mind is Flat

A radical reinterpretation of how your mind works - and why it could change your life

'An astonishing achievement. Nick Chater has blown my mind' Tim Harford

'Atotal assault on all lingering psychiatric and psychoanalytic notionsof mental depths ... Light the touchpaper and stand well back' New Scientist

Weall like to think we have a hidden inner life. Most of us assume thatour beliefs and desires arise from the murky depths of our minds, and,if only we could work out how to access this mysterious world, we couldtruly understand ourselves. For more than a century, psychologists andpsychiatrists have struggled to discover what lies below our mentalsurface.

In The Mind Is Flat, pre-eminent behaviouralscientist Nick Chater reveals that this entire enterprise is utterlymisguided. Drawing on startling new research in neuroscience,behavioural psychology and perception, he shows that we have no hiddendepths to plumb, and unconscious thought is a myth. Instead, we generateour ideas, motives and thoughts in the moment. This revelation explainsmany of the quirks of human behaviour - for example why our supposedlyfirm political beliefs, personal preferences and even our romanticattractions are routinely proven to be inconsistent and changeable.

Asthe reader discovers, through mind-bending visual examples andcounterintuitive experiments, we are all characters of our own creation,constantly improvising our behaviour based on our past experiences.And, as Chater shows us, recognising this can be liberating.

Reviews

Launched with what may be the most engaging prologue of any work of nonfiction, the reader of The Mind is Flat is taken on a fascinating intellectual journey. Chater first compels us to leave behind widely-accepted views about the depth of the mind, abandoning the cherished idea that thinking is rooted in the depths of unconscious thought. But far from depriving the life of the mind of its charm, magic or meaning, Chater introduces us to a new appreciation of the brain's remarkable propensity and capacity to make sense of experience. While the mind may indeed be flat in the sense it is devoid of unconscious ruminations, reading this book leaves us with a much deeper, transformed, understanding of our own thoughts and feelings and of how we perceive the definitively non-flat world in which we live