The mind is flat - Nick Chater

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

'A
total assault on all lingering psychiatric and psychoanalytic notions
of mental depths ... Light the touchpaper and stand well back' New Scientist

We
all like to think we have a hidden inner life. Most of us assume that
our 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 could
truly understand ourselves. For more than a century, psychologists and
psychiatrists have struggled to discover what lies below our mental
surface.

In The Mind Is Flat, pre-eminent behavioural
scientist Nick Chater reveals that this entire enterprise is utterly
misguided. Drawing on startling new research in neuroscience,
behavioural psychology and perception, he shows that we have no hidden
depths to plumb, and unconscious thought is a myth. Instead, we generate
our ideas, motives and thoughts in the moment. This revelation explains
many of the quirks of human behaviour - for example why our supposedly
firm political beliefs, personal preferences and even our romantic
attractions are routinely proven to be inconsistent and changeable.

As
the reader discovers, through mind-bending visual examples and
counterintuitive 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.