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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
'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.
'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.
272 pages, Hardcover
Published March 29, 2018
About the author
Nick Chater
22 books32 followersNick Chater is a cognitive psychologist who is a professor of behavioral science at Warwick University and has held chairs in psychology at Warwick and at University College London. He has written over 250 publications, has won four national awards for psychological research, and has served as associate editor for the journals Cognitive Science, Psychological Review, and Psychological Science. His previous trade book, The Mind is Flat, won the Association of American Publishers PROSE Award for Best Book in Clinical Psychology, 2018. He lives near Warwick, United Kingdom.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 109 reviews
August 31, 2022
Q: Literary depths, mental shallows. (c) An apt description of this book.
I've never been able to grab someone's belief, that's about the only thing I agree with in this book. I don't think anyone else ever did. Well, maybe someone did but they chose not to tell the tale to the rest of us.
This seems to be haunting the author to no end. Yeah, no one ever observed fears. Or beliefs. Or hopes. Or did they? Were they expecting a disembodied hope or maybe desire to float around for a bit to be prodded or touched or drawn or what?
I just don't think that the fact that we don't see feelings as separate beings per se but rather observe them as they are reflected by a human psyche could diminish their validity. We don't see gravitation, transcendence or the idea of a cube either, does that mean they don't exist?
Well, let me say that no matter the conclusions the author comes to, I still don't feel flat. While I, as a regular human being, might not be aware of all my motivations or perceptions or feelings or even of all the contents of my subconsciousness (at all or some times), I still feel to be a lot more than 3D. N-D would be more fitting here. Most other people also seem to be multidimentional complex beings, I'm not unique in that respect.
I really like the discussion about fictional vs real beings psychology and all. Yet, the conclusion that real life Anna would be just as an empty shell as a fictional one is jarring and plain wrong. This mechanistic view of humans doesn't feel to be true and is largely unbased.
Basically, the guy read some books about AI and, just because we aproach programming the machines in a very unbiological way, decided that as humans we are machince as well. AND, that, as machines, we are an etude into the machine learning and as such we are not really too deep. This is probably the most unhealthy take on psychology that I've ever seen. Basically, the hole book is built on the idea that had we been deep thinkers, we would've build generalist AIs. Well, we are shitty at computer building so far. Which doesn't necessary mean we're flat one-dimentional beings without psyches to speak of.
I hope that Nick isn't a practicing psychologist for the sake of his potential clients. They don't need someone with such simplistic perception further messing up their heads.
Q:
No amount of therapy, dream analysis, word association, experiment or brain-scanning can recover a person’s ‘true motives’, not because they are difficult to find, but because there is nothing to find. It is not hard to plumb our mental depths because they are so deep and so murky, but because there are no mental depths to plumb. (c) Well, for some people that might definitely be true. Not everyone might have a complex mind or a network of possibly conflicting drivers. Some individuals might actually be closer to amoebas, I've long suspected. And it seems this idea gets vindicated at great lenghth in NC's book.
Q:
From the ‘hidden depths’ standpoint, then, uncovering the true motivations for human behaviour needs more than the blunderbuss of asking people directly. It requires delicacy and sophistication. (c)
Q:
The first possible moral is that our minds have dark and unfathomable ‘hidden depths’. From this viewpoint, we cannot expect people reliably to be able to look within themselves and compile a complete and true account of their beliefs and motives. Explanations of behaviour, whether from observers or participants, and whether before, during or after the event, are partial and unreliable at best. (c)
Q:
From the ‘hidden depths’ standpoint, then, uncovering the true motivations for human behaviour needs more than the blunderbuss of asking people directly. It requires delicacy and sophistication. We need somehow to dive deep into the inner workings of the mind, and to measure directly the hidden beliefs, desires, motives, fears, suspicions and hopes governing our actions, forces of which we may ourselves be only dimly aware. Psychologists, psychiatrists and neuroscientists have long debated how best to plumb the deep waters of human motivation. Word associations, the interpretation of dreams, hours of intensive psychotherapy, behavioural experiments, physiological recordings and brain imaging have all been popular options over the last century or so. Whatever the method, the objective is clear: to discover the feelings, motives and beliefs that lurk below the mental ‘surface’ of conscious awareness – to chart, in short, our hidden depths. Yet the contents of our hidden depths seem to remain perpetually elusive. Freudian psychoanalysts can speculate about our hidden fears and desires; psychologists and neuroscientists can attempt to draw subtle and highly indirect conclusions from actions, heart-rate, skin conductance, pupil dilation and the rate of blood flow in the brain. But no hidden beliefs, desires, hopes or fears are ever actually observed (c) So very minimalistic.
Q:
We invent interpretations of ourselves and other people in the flow of experience, just as we conjure up interpretations of fictional characters from a flow of written text. Each possibility can be challenged with endless alternatives. (c)
Q:
But all of this depth, richness and endless scope for exploration is utterly fake. There is no inner world. Our flow of momentary conscious experience is not the sparkling surface of a vast sea of thought – it is all there is. And, as we shall see, each momentary experience turns out to be startlingly sketchy – at any moment, we can recognize just one face, or read just one word, or identify just one object. (c) Is it right? 1 word? 1 face? Nah, I don't think that's the usual experience.
Q:
We’ll see that a very different picture emerges from psychological experiments, the ‘wiring’ of brain circuits, and the processing mechanisms in modern machine-learning and artificial intelligence that are inspired by cooperative, brain-style computation. (c) The 'brain-style computation' is not a thing. There's no such thing. The neural networks have precious little to do with actual living brain being just a model with nodes called 'neurons'. So, the processing mechanisms of ML are not a thing that should influence real life psychology.
I've never been able to grab someone's belief, that's about the only thing I agree with in this book. I don't think anyone else ever did. Well, maybe someone did but they chose not to tell the tale to the rest of us.
This seems to be haunting the author to no end. Yeah, no one ever observed fears. Or beliefs. Or hopes. Or did they? Were they expecting a disembodied hope or maybe desire to float around for a bit to be prodded or touched or drawn or what?
I just don't think that the fact that we don't see feelings as separate beings per se but rather observe them as they are reflected by a human psyche could diminish their validity. We don't see gravitation, transcendence or the idea of a cube either, does that mean they don't exist?
Well, let me say that no matter the conclusions the author comes to, I still don't feel flat. While I, as a regular human being, might not be aware of all my motivations or perceptions or feelings or even of all the contents of my subconsciousness (at all or some times), I still feel to be a lot more than 3D. N-D would be more fitting here. Most other people also seem to be multidimentional complex beings, I'm not unique in that respect.
I really like the discussion about fictional vs real beings psychology and all. Yet, the conclusion that real life Anna would be just as an empty shell as a fictional one is jarring and plain wrong. This mechanistic view of humans doesn't feel to be true and is largely unbased.
Basically, the guy read some books about AI and, just because we aproach programming the machines in a very unbiological way, decided that as humans we are machince as well. AND, that, as machines, we are an etude into the machine learning and as such we are not really too deep. This is probably the most unhealthy take on psychology that I've ever seen. Basically, the hole book is built on the idea that had we been deep thinkers, we would've build generalist AIs. Well, we are shitty at computer building so far. Which doesn't necessary mean we're flat one-dimentional beings without psyches to speak of.
I hope that Nick isn't a practicing psychologist for the sake of his potential clients. They don't need someone with such simplistic perception further messing up their heads.
Q:
No amount of therapy, dream analysis, word association, experiment or brain-scanning can recover a person’s ‘true motives’, not because they are difficult to find, but because there is nothing to find. It is not hard to plumb our mental depths because they are so deep and so murky, but because there are no mental depths to plumb. (c) Well, for some people that might definitely be true. Not everyone might have a complex mind or a network of possibly conflicting drivers. Some individuals might actually be closer to amoebas, I've long suspected. And it seems this idea gets vindicated at great lenghth in NC's book.
Q:
From the ‘hidden depths’ standpoint, then, uncovering the true motivations for human behaviour needs more than the blunderbuss of asking people directly. It requires delicacy and sophistication. (c)
Q:
The first possible moral is that our minds have dark and unfathomable ‘hidden depths’. From this viewpoint, we cannot expect people reliably to be able to look within themselves and compile a complete and true account of their beliefs and motives. Explanations of behaviour, whether from observers or participants, and whether before, during or after the event, are partial and unreliable at best. (c)
Q:
From the ‘hidden depths’ standpoint, then, uncovering the true motivations for human behaviour needs more than the blunderbuss of asking people directly. It requires delicacy and sophistication. We need somehow to dive deep into the inner workings of the mind, and to measure directly the hidden beliefs, desires, motives, fears, suspicions and hopes governing our actions, forces of which we may ourselves be only dimly aware. Psychologists, psychiatrists and neuroscientists have long debated how best to plumb the deep waters of human motivation. Word associations, the interpretation of dreams, hours of intensive psychotherapy, behavioural experiments, physiological recordings and brain imaging have all been popular options over the last century or so. Whatever the method, the objective is clear: to discover the feelings, motives and beliefs that lurk below the mental ‘surface’ of conscious awareness – to chart, in short, our hidden depths. Yet the contents of our hidden depths seem to remain perpetually elusive. Freudian psychoanalysts can speculate about our hidden fears and desires; psychologists and neuroscientists can attempt to draw subtle and highly indirect conclusions from actions, heart-rate, skin conductance, pupil dilation and the rate of blood flow in the brain. But no hidden beliefs, desires, hopes or fears are ever actually observed (c) So very minimalistic.
Q:
We invent interpretations of ourselves and other people in the flow of experience, just as we conjure up interpretations of fictional characters from a flow of written text. Each possibility can be challenged with endless alternatives. (c)
Q:
But all of this depth, richness and endless scope for exploration is utterly fake. There is no inner world. Our flow of momentary conscious experience is not the sparkling surface of a vast sea of thought – it is all there is. And, as we shall see, each momentary experience turns out to be startlingly sketchy – at any moment, we can recognize just one face, or read just one word, or identify just one object. (c) Is it right? 1 word? 1 face? Nah, I don't think that's the usual experience.
Q:
We’ll see that a very different picture emerges from psychological experiments, the ‘wiring’ of brain circuits, and the processing mechanisms in modern machine-learning and artificial intelligence that are inspired by cooperative, brain-style computation. (c) The 'brain-style computation' is not a thing. There's no such thing. The neural networks have precious little to do with actual living brain being just a model with nodes called 'neurons'. So, the processing mechanisms of ML are not a thing that should influence real life psychology.
May 23, 2018
Good for: rethinking perception if you know little about it
After finishing this book I had an impression that I am living a life of a fictional character in a fictional world. My body is nothing else but a signal processing system, striving cycle by cycle to impose meaning of sensory input. The meaningful interpretations are concsious-yielding a world of patterns, object, colours, voices, world, letters, faces, and more. But this was not new to me. Much of his book echoes with the "no-self" views found in buddhism and philosophers such as David Hume. But Chater's version of this view can often seem like a mere redescription of our ordinary ideas rather than a breakthrough point in understanding. Despite that the book has good references (my favourite part was about Herman von Helmholtz), it was very interesting to read and I believe it is a light version of some parts of The Oxford Companion to the Mind.
A few of the gems herein:
We are always conscious of the results of our interpretation of sensory information, and we are never conscious of the process by which these interpretations are created.
Thus our feelings do not burst unbidden from within-they do not pre-exist at all. Instead, they are our brain's best momentary interpretation of feedback about our current bodily state, in the light of the situation we are in. We 'read' our own bodily states to interpret our own emotions, in much the same way as we read the facial expressions of other people to interpret their emotions.
An emotion is the interpretation of a bodily state. Having an emotion at all is a paradigmatic act of interpretation.
The brain is continually scrambling to link together scraps of sensory information. We 'crete' our perception of an entire visual world from a succession of fragments, picked up one t a time. Yet our conscious experience is merely the output of this remarkable process; we have little or o insight into the relevant sensory inputs or how they are combined.
If we are conscious of one thing at a time, and the brain is a network of 100 billion neurons communicating by streams of electrochemical pulses, we must necessarily be unconscious of almost everything our brain does.
After finishing this book I had an impression that I am living a life of a fictional character in a fictional world. My body is nothing else but a signal processing system, striving cycle by cycle to impose meaning of sensory input. The meaningful interpretations are concsious-yielding a world of patterns, object, colours, voices, world, letters, faces, and more. But this was not new to me. Much of his book echoes with the "no-self" views found in buddhism and philosophers such as David Hume. But Chater's version of this view can often seem like a mere redescription of our ordinary ideas rather than a breakthrough point in understanding. Despite that the book has good references (my favourite part was about Herman von Helmholtz), it was very interesting to read and I believe it is a light version of some parts of The Oxford Companion to the Mind.
A few of the gems herein:
We are always conscious of the results of our interpretation of sensory information, and we are never conscious of the process by which these interpretations are created.
Thus our feelings do not burst unbidden from within-they do not pre-exist at all. Instead, they are our brain's best momentary interpretation of feedback about our current bodily state, in the light of the situation we are in. We 'read' our own bodily states to interpret our own emotions, in much the same way as we read the facial expressions of other people to interpret their emotions.
An emotion is the interpretation of a bodily state. Having an emotion at all is a paradigmatic act of interpretation.
The brain is continually scrambling to link together scraps of sensory information. We 'crete' our perception of an entire visual world from a succession of fragments, picked up one t a time. Yet our conscious experience is merely the output of this remarkable process; we have little or o insight into the relevant sensory inputs or how they are combined.
If we are conscious of one thing at a time, and the brain is a network of 100 billion neurons communicating by streams of electrochemical pulses, we must necessarily be unconscious of almost everything our brain does.
October 6, 2018
Este puede ser uno de los libros más importantes del siglo XXI en el mundo de la psicología.
El autor lleva más allá las ideas de Daniel Dennett sobre la consciencia y acumula una gran cantidad de pruebas que muestran que el inconsciente tal y como lo concebimos, simplemente no existe. No hay profundidades ocultas que podemos sacar a la luz. El cerebro piensa una cosa cada vez, en un constante esfuerzo por dar significado a los estímulos del entorno. Todo es percepción y memoria. No hay más, y es algo que debería alegrarnos.
La tesis de este libro básicamente destruye toda la psicología popular, todas las pseudoterapias derivadas del psicoanálisis, todo. Es un borrón y cuenta nueva.
Haré cuando pueda una reseña más detallada en el blog, porque hay que ir capítulo a capítulo. Pero este libro es esencial.
El autor lleva más allá las ideas de Daniel Dennett sobre la consciencia y acumula una gran cantidad de pruebas que muestran que el inconsciente tal y como lo concebimos, simplemente no existe. No hay profundidades ocultas que podemos sacar a la luz. El cerebro piensa una cosa cada vez, en un constante esfuerzo por dar significado a los estímulos del entorno. Todo es percepción y memoria. No hay más, y es algo que debería alegrarnos.
La tesis de este libro básicamente destruye toda la psicología popular, todas las pseudoterapias derivadas del psicoanálisis, todo. Es un borrón y cuenta nueva.
Haré cuando pueda una reseña más detallada en el blog, porque hay que ir capítulo a capítulo. Pero este libro es esencial.
July 24, 2018
This might transpire to be a successful application letter to give TED talks, but it's ultimately disappointingly vapid. It isn't so much that the assertions here, so far as they go, are incorrect - but the writing is boring in the same way atheistic treatises are boring. Everything is "remarkable", everything "turns out" to be the case as a result of the extrapolation of hand-picked studies. There are so many omissions to the story painted - for one, the writer seems to imagine a homogenous human subject for whom phenomena such as autism do not warrant consideration - and some fundamental self-contradictions - denying the existence of un/subconscious thought while tautologically allowing for its existence. The writer seems to be too in love with his radical nihilism, and there is little capital to be found from his conclusions. The writer at one point discusses metaphor, and even admits that his own pronouncements are themselves metaphor - yet he doesn't allow that line of thinking to take him to an obvious conclusion, which is that he simply isn't allowing the space for metaphor to exist when talking about human thought and the necessary elisions that are made to allow humans a stable sense of identity. It's difficult to imagine this book having been written by a woman, or for that matter any of the laudatory pullquotes that line the book - that is quite telling.
December 20, 2021
هذا كتابٌ فذّ!
يعيد النظر فيما اعتدنا تداوله من مفاهيم تدور حول "العقل الباطن"؛ ذلك الدهليز العميق حاوي الأسرار ومنبع الأفكار.
يقول الكاتب أنْ ليس هناك إلا السطح. لا أعماق هنا ولا أسرار. إنما هو الإدراك المباشر؛ يصل إلى عقلٍ ارتجاليٍّ بارع في ملء الفراغات و"فبركة" القصص والتفسيرات والتبريرات.
وهذا طرح يخالف صاحبه المعروف المتوارث والمألوف المتداول في علوم العقل والنفس. فالعقل الباطن، ومنذ فرويد، أصل يبدو مكيناً في فهم النفس البشرية وجميع ما يتعلّق بها.
يقيم الكاتب حجته معتمداً على الدراسات والملاحظات، ويبدع في ضرب الأمثلة التي يطرح من خلالها تصوراته.
ويميز الكاتب بين العقل الباطن بمفهومه الفضفاض، وبين خفاء العمليات التي يقوم بها الدماغ. ولكنه-برأيي- لم يستطع تخليص "الذاكرة" من براثن العقل الخفي العميق، ولم يقدم تفسيرا يطفو بها إلى السطح ثنائي الأبعاد.
كتاب يستحقّ القراءة، وإعادة القراءة. ويستحقّ التفكّر في طرحه الواعد بإطلالة جديدة ومختلفةٍ تماماً على العقل والتفكير والسلوك الإنساني.
يعيد النظر فيما اعتدنا تداوله من مفاهيم تدور حول "العقل الباطن"؛ ذلك الدهليز العميق حاوي الأسرار ومنبع الأفكار.
يقول الكاتب أنْ ليس هناك إلا السطح. لا أعماق هنا ولا أسرار. إنما هو الإدراك المباشر؛ يصل إلى عقلٍ ارتجاليٍّ بارع في ملء الفراغات و"فبركة" القصص والتفسيرات والتبريرات.
وهذا طرح يخالف صاحبه المعروف المتوارث والمألوف المتداول في علوم العقل والنفس. فالعقل الباطن، ومنذ فرويد، أصل يبدو مكيناً في فهم النفس البشرية وجميع ما يتعلّق بها.
يقيم الكاتب حجته معتمداً على الدراسات والملاحظات، ويبدع في ضرب الأمثلة التي يطرح من خلالها تصوراته.
ويميز الكاتب بين العقل الباطن بمفهومه الفضفاض، وبين خفاء العمليات التي يقوم بها الدماغ. ولكنه-برأيي- لم يستطع تخليص "الذاكرة" من براثن العقل الخفي العميق، ولم يقدم تفسيرا يطفو بها إلى السطح ثنائي الأبعاد.
كتاب يستحقّ القراءة، وإعادة القراءة. ويستحقّ التفكّر في طرحه الواعد بإطلالة جديدة ومختلفةٍ تماماً على العقل والتفكير والسلوك الإنساني.
August 20, 2020
Nick Chater’s central claim is that mental depth is an illusion. The claim is not new of course – Georges-Louis de Buffon’s “the style is the man himself”, Friedrich Nietzsche’s “there are no beautiful surfaces without terrible depths” , and more recently, Aaron Haspel’s “it’s surface all the way down” all swim in the same pond. In the book Chater identifies what he believes to be the mechanism that generates this illusion, and explores the features of consciousness, cognition, agency, and feelings that animate its persistence.
Being sympathetic to the thesis, I very much enjoyed the book, and, as many reviewers point out, it can serve as a terrific dinner conversation starter. In the end though, it fails to deliver a sufficiently convincing case. I will briefly point out a few facets of his argument that I found problematic.
Feelings. It is instructive to compare Chater’s view of feelings with Antonio Damasio’s. Both recognize that feelings are mental representations of physiological states. Damasio recognizes a handful of core low-level physiological states (e.g. anger, fear, disgust, joy), and these get processed and interpreted by our brain as a wide spectrum of feelings. Chater suggests that our brain is not an interpreter, but a confabulator. In other words, all our feelings is an extended application of the Kuleshov effect (i.e. cinematic effect where an ambiguous face expression gets interpreted quite differently depending on a context).
For example, Chater cites experiments where subjects interpreted externally-induced adrenaline as romantic attraction, or anger, or elation, all as a function of a situation that subjects were placed in. Sure, there are plenty of manipulated or “real” situations where the same physiological signature may get interpreted differently, but in most cases the feelings are considerably less ambiguous. Chances are, when you are angry at a person, you aren’t channeling latent love.
Measurement and Ambiguity. Time and time again, Chater points out that people’s decisions, preferences, and feelings are often ambiguous and inconsistent. From this he concludes that these preferences and feelings are an illusion. This seems abjectly false: just because you can’t properly measure a phenomenon doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.
Genetics. Chater doesn’t confront at all a blatant and verifiable challenge to his thesis - heritability. For example, monozygotic twins are remarkably similar even when reared apart. Monozygotic twins are more similar than dizygotic ones, adopted children resemble their biological parents more than they resemble their adoptive parents etc. If the mind is a confabulator of sensory experience imposed by environment where does this similarity come from?
In his defense, we could legitimately propose that genetics lays a blueprint for how that confabulator is constructed and how fast it runs. Fine, that could conceivably explain away the similarities in personality between twins. But then, we are all born with differently-powered differently-designed confabulators which affect the formation of our personality, and that begins to smell a lot like “mental depth” that Chater claims is an illusion.
Still, I recommend the book, although its broad claim doesn’t hit the target, it correctly challenges a lot of our intuitions and successfully overthrows a quite few of them. Definitely a fun read.
Being sympathetic to the thesis, I very much enjoyed the book, and, as many reviewers point out, it can serve as a terrific dinner conversation starter. In the end though, it fails to deliver a sufficiently convincing case. I will briefly point out a few facets of his argument that I found problematic.
Feelings. It is instructive to compare Chater’s view of feelings with Antonio Damasio’s. Both recognize that feelings are mental representations of physiological states. Damasio recognizes a handful of core low-level physiological states (e.g. anger, fear, disgust, joy), and these get processed and interpreted by our brain as a wide spectrum of feelings. Chater suggests that our brain is not an interpreter, but a confabulator. In other words, all our feelings is an extended application of the Kuleshov effect (i.e. cinematic effect where an ambiguous face expression gets interpreted quite differently depending on a context).
For example, Chater cites experiments where subjects interpreted externally-induced adrenaline as romantic attraction, or anger, or elation, all as a function of a situation that subjects were placed in. Sure, there are plenty of manipulated or “real” situations where the same physiological signature may get interpreted differently, but in most cases the feelings are considerably less ambiguous. Chances are, when you are angry at a person, you aren’t channeling latent love.
Measurement and Ambiguity. Time and time again, Chater points out that people’s decisions, preferences, and feelings are often ambiguous and inconsistent. From this he concludes that these preferences and feelings are an illusion. This seems abjectly false: just because you can’t properly measure a phenomenon doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.
Genetics. Chater doesn’t confront at all a blatant and verifiable challenge to his thesis - heritability. For example, monozygotic twins are remarkably similar even when reared apart. Monozygotic twins are more similar than dizygotic ones, adopted children resemble their biological parents more than they resemble their adoptive parents etc. If the mind is a confabulator of sensory experience imposed by environment where does this similarity come from?
In his defense, we could legitimately propose that genetics lays a blueprint for how that confabulator is constructed and how fast it runs. Fine, that could conceivably explain away the similarities in personality between twins. But then, we are all born with differently-powered differently-designed confabulators which affect the formation of our personality, and that begins to smell a lot like “mental depth” that Chater claims is an illusion.
Still, I recommend the book, although its broad claim doesn’t hit the target, it correctly challenges a lot of our intuitions and successfully overthrows a quite few of them. Definitely a fun read.
April 18, 2021
I think the name of the book is a meta play, because the book convinces you of just that -"the mind is flat". It is also the most convincing case I have read against AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), even while showing why we have had successes in narrow AI. Before you think it's an AI book, it's not, it's about the human mind. We think of our mind having depths that we cannot fathom at this point, consisting of inner motives, beliefs and desires, many of which are unfathomable to us, and that behaviour is just a superficial aspect of it. This book argues that no such depths exist. The mind is flat.
But what the mind is, is an excellent and immediate improvisor of actions, and beliefs and desires to explain the actions. My mental (re)action was "no way", even though a part of this was familiar to me thanks to "How Emotions are made". The author divides his case into two parts - the first part dismantles the perceptions created by classic psychology about beliefs, desires, hopes, and aims to prove that there is no "inner world", and the second part provides an alternate theory - memory traces of previous momentary thoughts and experiences.
What really works is the accessibility of the narrative and how it is structured. It's never a "believe me because I told you so". Instead, we are led through a series of visual and thought exercises that question our understanding of reality. Slowly, a shallow world of improvisations are revealed to us. The mind works on "precedents, not principles", and our emotions are creative acts made by a superb interpreter - our mind. With multiple examples, he shows our capacity to create "meaning" from nothing. Our inventiveness is brought out by the metaphors we live by, which are not always bound by "cold logic". And that's why we are able to create AI in areas where solutions are precisely defined. A general AI would require imaginative interpretations, something humans are very good at, but not really able to explain how!
This does lead to my favourite "free will vs determinism" debate, and once again, the answer is that at any point, despite the determinism that has happened because nature and nurture, we have the freedom to change our mind. But then again, if it is flat, what's there to change? Or does it contain a coda of traditions and precedents in the form of genes? While we create meaning from nothing, our quest for the depths of the mind is also perhaps a need to find "meaning". I'll leave it at that.
But what the mind is, is an excellent and immediate improvisor of actions, and beliefs and desires to explain the actions. My mental (re)action was "no way", even though a part of this was familiar to me thanks to "How Emotions are made". The author divides his case into two parts - the first part dismantles the perceptions created by classic psychology about beliefs, desires, hopes, and aims to prove that there is no "inner world", and the second part provides an alternate theory - memory traces of previous momentary thoughts and experiences.
What really works is the accessibility of the narrative and how it is structured. It's never a "believe me because I told you so". Instead, we are led through a series of visual and thought exercises that question our understanding of reality. Slowly, a shallow world of improvisations are revealed to us. The mind works on "precedents, not principles", and our emotions are creative acts made by a superb interpreter - our mind. With multiple examples, he shows our capacity to create "meaning" from nothing. Our inventiveness is brought out by the metaphors we live by, which are not always bound by "cold logic". And that's why we are able to create AI in areas where solutions are precisely defined. A general AI would require imaginative interpretations, something humans are very good at, but not really able to explain how!
This does lead to my favourite "free will vs determinism" debate, and once again, the answer is that at any point, despite the determinism that has happened because nature and nurture, we have the freedom to change our mind. But then again, if it is flat, what's there to change? Or does it contain a coda of traditions and precedents in the form of genes? While we create meaning from nothing, our quest for the depths of the mind is also perhaps a need to find "meaning". I'll leave it at that.
November 2, 2019
The illusion is .. that this book has any depth. To be fair, though, if you haven't read much (any) psychology this would be a good way to get introduced into a truly fascinating subject - the human mind. This is not a text book but the author does take the reader through a series of fairly well-known texts to support his argument. However, if you've read "Thinking, Fast and Slow" you probably won't get much new out of it. I was recommended the book by an economist that had rated it very highly. I am not sure why to be honest. Perhaps it was new material to him. If so, perhaps that just highlights the problem with economists - they only just seem to be getting round to the idea that human beings aren't all the predictable, profit-seeking, rational, one size fits all creatures their models assume.
February 26, 2019
The mind is flat an intriguing thesis, that our minds are constant improvisers that have no underlying depth to them - no thought but the stream of consciousness. But it is let down by a blunt argument that does not consider with any seriousness potential objections except to dismiss the preexisting views as nothing more than outdated (pre-scientifix) intuitions or mysticism.
Chat makes a leap from the shallow imagery of imagination and dreams, to ruling out beliefs, desires and motives using the nebulous outcomes of Freudian psychoanalysis as his foil. I'm sympathetic to this line of argument but that doesn't even begin to survey the field.
I was left with a number of worries. The most prominent being the amount of work being done by "tradition" in Chat's account of how the mind improvises it's thoughts on the hoof without any beliefs, desires or other intentional notions. He can't get away from intentional talk in his explanation except to postulate such talk are illusionary, leaving nothing but a mystifying improvisation process as a substitute to hope, ambition, antipathy, bias etc
Furthermore, there was little explanation how perceptual thinking, which he posits is more or less the sum of all thinking, becomes creative. Deep cognition, that in my experience at least, can take time required a turning away of attention.
And it is hard to believe Chat has never come across scientists, engineers or artists who plan complex experiments, designs and works in their mind testing out possibilities before committing to tactile sensorimotor work. But according to Chat's argument, such deep thinking is impossible or at best an illusion.
This was a bold and surprising thesis that needed more than the cherry picked scientific evidence on offer to be convincing.
Chat makes a leap from the shallow imagery of imagination and dreams, to ruling out beliefs, desires and motives using the nebulous outcomes of Freudian psychoanalysis as his foil. I'm sympathetic to this line of argument but that doesn't even begin to survey the field.
I was left with a number of worries. The most prominent being the amount of work being done by "tradition" in Chat's account of how the mind improvises it's thoughts on the hoof without any beliefs, desires or other intentional notions. He can't get away from intentional talk in his explanation except to postulate such talk are illusionary, leaving nothing but a mystifying improvisation process as a substitute to hope, ambition, antipathy, bias etc
Furthermore, there was little explanation how perceptual thinking, which he posits is more or less the sum of all thinking, becomes creative. Deep cognition, that in my experience at least, can take time required a turning away of attention.
And it is hard to believe Chat has never come across scientists, engineers or artists who plan complex experiments, designs and works in their mind testing out possibilities before committing to tactile sensorimotor work. But according to Chat's argument, such deep thinking is impossible or at best an illusion.
This was a bold and surprising thesis that needed more than the cherry picked scientific evidence on offer to be convincing.
August 12, 2018
Tim Harford raved about this book so I had high expectations but I was disappointed.
For a start it's not very well written and rather repetitive (and poorly copy-edited with a clutch of typos). I found the idea that my mind has no depth, and that my brain is constantly hoaxing me that it does, rather disturbing to start with but as I didn't find the argument entirely convincing my initial epistemological insecurity disappeared.
Chater has amassed a great deal of authoritative looking scientific research to back up his ideas and uses some pictures of visual illusions to drive home his points but I wondered how much research exists that actually contradicts his thesis. He sideswipes Freud in passing but I'd like to know a bit more about whether modern science has really provided evidence that undermines Freudian approaches.
I'm very interested in the use of metaphor and in the course of my own work I've read quite a lot about it so when I got to the last section I perked up. I was ready to be persuaded that the pervasiveness of metaphorical thinking is part of the brain's way of making the horizontal connections that Chater argues belie the notion of hidden depths of the mind, but this section seemed like a short afterthought and could have been helpfully extended to link to "the cycle of thought".
A really good version of this book which demonstrated a more balanced approach to the science might have prompted me to do more more reading around the topic but by the time I'd finished this I was yawning.
For a start it's not very well written and rather repetitive (and poorly copy-edited with a clutch of typos). I found the idea that my mind has no depth, and that my brain is constantly hoaxing me that it does, rather disturbing to start with but as I didn't find the argument entirely convincing my initial epistemological insecurity disappeared.
Chater has amassed a great deal of authoritative looking scientific research to back up his ideas and uses some pictures of visual illusions to drive home his points but I wondered how much research exists that actually contradicts his thesis. He sideswipes Freud in passing but I'd like to know a bit more about whether modern science has really provided evidence that undermines Freudian approaches.
I'm very interested in the use of metaphor and in the course of my own work I've read quite a lot about it so when I got to the last section I perked up. I was ready to be persuaded that the pervasiveness of metaphorical thinking is part of the brain's way of making the horizontal connections that Chater argues belie the notion of hidden depths of the mind, but this section seemed like a short afterthought and could have been helpfully extended to link to "the cycle of thought".
A really good version of this book which demonstrated a more balanced approach to the science might have prompted me to do more more reading around the topic but by the time I'd finished this I was yawning.
Read
March 27, 2019A book with a stupid premise. Of course the brain is a complex information processing system which is governed by certain transparent principles, and generates our thoughts and perceptions on the fly. The fact that we do not experience its workings transparently points to the fact that we 1. do not have direct control of our mind 2. are subject to influences deep within our brains which are not necessarily subject to change.
Of course there is a self that we generate in behavioural context, especially social ones and processing our own thoughts. The fact that this self is persistent and changes slowly, unlike other perceptions and memories that go in one ear only to come out the other, means that there are "deeper" and "shallower" regions of the mind.
These people proposing some new revolutionary idea about the brain all the time should just stuff it. In the case of this author, one must wonder if there is something wrong with his own mind.
Of course there is a self that we generate in behavioural context, especially social ones and processing our own thoughts. The fact that this self is persistent and changes slowly, unlike other perceptions and memories that go in one ear only to come out the other, means that there are "deeper" and "shallower" regions of the mind.
These people proposing some new revolutionary idea about the brain all the time should just stuff it. In the case of this author, one must wonder if there is something wrong with his own mind.
December 31, 2018
Chater is is a Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School and Scientist-in-residence of the BBC The Human Zoo. He makes an outrageous claim: rather than having conscious and unconscious thoughts, our mind is Flat. Our brain constantly interprets sensory perception, trying to make sense of it with past precedence stored inside, to produce a narrative.
This is an astounding claim, considering that from Freud onwards we have been taught that we have an inner self. Kahneman wrote a whole book about our 2 system: the fast reflexive one and slow and insightful one. Chater says that there is no mental depth, no inner self!
He started off with optical illusions. He showed the amazing fact that if we keep staring at an object, parts of it disappear. Instead we see coherent parts of the picture. Our eyes need to keep darting around to make sense of what is happening around us. Our brain can recognise and manipulate coherent images much better than random ones.
Split brain surgery showed that patients’ left and right brain cannot communicate with each other. When images are manipulated so that only the right brain sees an image, the patient interacts with it normally and then the left brain conjures up a seemingly logical explanation of why he had performed the action.
He then showed that we do not have an accurate memory of simple things such as the pattern of stripes of tigers. So we know a tiger is a tiger from the overall impression but not a photographic memory of it.
Even our feelings are not specific. The famous experiment where an attractive female met the male subjects either at a solid bridge or swing bridge showed that the men were more likely to contact her if they were on the swing bridge and thus the body reacted with increase heart rate. Their mind then attributed the reaction as infatuation.
When people were asked to choose a candidate, and then their choice was switched, people were able to still explain why they had chosen the (not chosen) choice!
So our mind sees only the result of the summary interpretation of all our sensory input and previous experience. This is our consciousness.
He ended with an upbeat assessment of the secret of human intelligence: the ability to find patterns in the least structured, most unexpected, hugely variable of streams of information. This is far beyond the reach of modern artificial intelligence.
I am very impressed by this book!
This is an astounding claim, considering that from Freud onwards we have been taught that we have an inner self. Kahneman wrote a whole book about our 2 system: the fast reflexive one and slow and insightful one. Chater says that there is no mental depth, no inner self!
He started off with optical illusions. He showed the amazing fact that if we keep staring at an object, parts of it disappear. Instead we see coherent parts of the picture. Our eyes need to keep darting around to make sense of what is happening around us. Our brain can recognise and manipulate coherent images much better than random ones.
Split brain surgery showed that patients’ left and right brain cannot communicate with each other. When images are manipulated so that only the right brain sees an image, the patient interacts with it normally and then the left brain conjures up a seemingly logical explanation of why he had performed the action.
He then showed that we do not have an accurate memory of simple things such as the pattern of stripes of tigers. So we know a tiger is a tiger from the overall impression but not a photographic memory of it.
Even our feelings are not specific. The famous experiment where an attractive female met the male subjects either at a solid bridge or swing bridge showed that the men were more likely to contact her if they were on the swing bridge and thus the body reacted with increase heart rate. Their mind then attributed the reaction as infatuation.
When people were asked to choose a candidate, and then their choice was switched, people were able to still explain why they had chosen the (not chosen) choice!
So our mind sees only the result of the summary interpretation of all our sensory input and previous experience. This is our consciousness.
He ended with an upbeat assessment of the secret of human intelligence: the ability to find patterns in the least structured, most unexpected, hugely variable of streams of information. This is far beyond the reach of modern artificial intelligence.
I am very impressed by this book!
June 6, 2018
Interesting message. Interesting science. Annoyed by how many times each point was repeated though.
July 15, 2019
Smart pop psychology that isn't as sensationalist as it sounds. Chater explores the experimental evidence that we don't actually have anything like an unconscious mind. His take is that our conscious thought is the output of a biological computer that frantically shifts between different patterns many times per second, matching them up to build up a seemingly coherent understanding of the world around us.
Supposedly, this idea is a hard sell that requires serious debunking of traditional theories of the mind. I didn't find it hard to buy into, though, mostly because "the brain is a biological pattern-matching computer" is SUPER COOL . We're talking massive structures of perception and imagination, all built from tiny little slices of attention to a few words or shapes at a time. That's ten times more awesome than anything Freud came up with.
Chater's take is also less radical than it looks. It's not that we don't have unconscious "thought", it's that our unconscious mental processes work in a completely different way from our conscious structures of logic and narrative. Our unconscious mental processes are more like flipping through massive books of mugshots looking for a face we recognize than an exercise in reasoning or even calculation.
I wanted more computer science and/or linguistics in the book. Even though this model of our brains is very different from silicon computers, I think there are concepts in these fields that extend the model in even more interesting ways. But maybe Chater is saving that for a sequel. As is, this book is a compelling explanation of the mind that has some interesting applications for how we learn and solve problems.
Supposedly, this idea is a hard sell that requires serious debunking of traditional theories of the mind. I didn't find it hard to buy into, though, mostly because "the brain is a biological pattern-matching computer" is SUPER COOL . We're talking massive structures of perception and imagination, all built from tiny little slices of attention to a few words or shapes at a time. That's ten times more awesome than anything Freud came up with.
Chater's take is also less radical than it looks. It's not that we don't have unconscious "thought", it's that our unconscious mental processes work in a completely different way from our conscious structures of logic and narrative. Our unconscious mental processes are more like flipping through massive books of mugshots looking for a face we recognize than an exercise in reasoning or even calculation.
I wanted more computer science and/or linguistics in the book. Even though this model of our brains is very different from silicon computers, I think there are concepts in these fields that extend the model in even more interesting ways. But maybe Chater is saving that for a sequel. As is, this book is a compelling explanation of the mind that has some interesting applications for how we learn and solve problems.
March 25, 2019
Couldn’t bring myself to finish this book, but marked it as read nevertheless to remind myself not to pick this up again. Arguments don’t make sense, eg first chapter on how physics of falling coffee, sugar and ball bearings can’t be explained. And also, citing the lack of consistency in human preferences to support his argument that the brain has no depth (and hence we have no settled beliefs), when these consistencies are often a result of human biases and heuristics.
September 23, 2022
Der Kern des Buches dreht sich um die These, dass unser Selbst keinen tieferen Kern hat. Es handelt sich um eine ultra-biologische Sichtweise des menschlichen Seins.
Der Autor vertritt radikale Thesen rund um Gedanken, Gefühle und die innere Welt eines jeden Menschens.
Immer wieder begegnen mir im Buch jedoch Theorien/Thesen, von denen ich nicht überzeugt bin, dass sie tatsächlich auf so dickem wissenschaftlichem Fundament stehen wie der Autor es darstellt.
Insbesondere stehen einige Aussagen deutlich im Clinch mit Thesen/Theorien aus anderen Büchern die sich mit dem ähnlichen Problem beschäftigen (z.B. Vor dem Denken von John Bargh oder Schnelles Denken, Langsames Denken). Offensichtliche Widersprüche zwischen diesen wissenschaftlichen Thesen werden vollends übergangen, bspw. eine Auseinandersetzung mit Thesen zum Unterbewussten, welches laut dem Autor nicht existiert.
Insgesamt werden die Thesen sehr einseitig dargestellt, was dem wissenschaftlichen Anspruch an das (aus meiner Laiensicht) Buch nur teilweise genügt.
Stilistisch überflüssig und zu Teilen wirklich nervig sind die ständigen Wiederholungen und Zusammenfassungen der bisherigen Erkenntnise aus den vorherigen Kapiteln.
Im letzten Kapitel bildet der Autor dann eine willkommene Ergänzung zu den bis dahin radikalen Thesen. Indem er auf die Erinnerung und Erfahrungen die jeder Mensch sammelt, mit seinen Erläuterungen begibt er sich auch wieder auf Terrain welches mit anderen Ansichten bekannter Wissenschaftler übereinstimmt. Hier bewertet er erstmals offen wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse. In vorherigen Kapiteln geschah diese Bewertung meist unter dem Deckmantel „offensichtlich eindeutiger“ Experimentergebnisse.
Dieses letzte Kapitel verlieh dem Buch dann im Endergebnis auch den vierten Stern.
Der Autor vertritt radikale Thesen rund um Gedanken, Gefühle und die innere Welt eines jeden Menschens.
Immer wieder begegnen mir im Buch jedoch Theorien/Thesen, von denen ich nicht überzeugt bin, dass sie tatsächlich auf so dickem wissenschaftlichem Fundament stehen wie der Autor es darstellt.
Insbesondere stehen einige Aussagen deutlich im Clinch mit Thesen/Theorien aus anderen Büchern die sich mit dem ähnlichen Problem beschäftigen (z.B. Vor dem Denken von John Bargh oder Schnelles Denken, Langsames Denken). Offensichtliche Widersprüche zwischen diesen wissenschaftlichen Thesen werden vollends übergangen, bspw. eine Auseinandersetzung mit Thesen zum Unterbewussten, welches laut dem Autor nicht existiert.
Insgesamt werden die Thesen sehr einseitig dargestellt, was dem wissenschaftlichen Anspruch an das (aus meiner Laiensicht) Buch nur teilweise genügt.
Stilistisch überflüssig und zu Teilen wirklich nervig sind die ständigen Wiederholungen und Zusammenfassungen der bisherigen Erkenntnise aus den vorherigen Kapiteln.
Im letzten Kapitel bildet der Autor dann eine willkommene Ergänzung zu den bis dahin radikalen Thesen. Indem er auf die Erinnerung und Erfahrungen die jeder Mensch sammelt, mit seinen Erläuterungen begibt er sich auch wieder auf Terrain welches mit anderen Ansichten bekannter Wissenschaftler übereinstimmt. Hier bewertet er erstmals offen wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse. In vorherigen Kapiteln geschah diese Bewertung meist unter dem Deckmantel „offensichtlich eindeutiger“ Experimentergebnisse.
Dieses letzte Kapitel verlieh dem Buch dann im Endergebnis auch den vierten Stern.
September 10, 2022
An interesting book as it looks at the human brain and how we perceive things. 3.5 stars review
February 5, 2021
Such a good one. A lot of interesting experiments showing that our mind is indeed flat. It wasn’t as mind boggling as I wanted it to be and it was very understandable. It definitely was interesting and a bit of an eye opener, I had a couple eureka moments while reading it and a couple „oh No” moments while reading it as well, and by that I mean that well, we might as well not be as smart as we would want to be. FlatMind theory is the only flat theory im willing to accept.
April 5, 2020
2018.07.30–2018.07.31
Contents
Chater N (2018) (07:26) Mind Is Flat, The - The Illusion of Mental Depth and The Improvised Mind
Prologue: Literary Depth, Mental Shallows
Part I: The Illusion of Mental Depth
01. The Power of Invention
• artificial intelligence and the ‘inner oracle’
• the illusion of explanatory depth
• true believers in the inner oracle
• psychology: art or science?
02. The Feeling of Reality
• from words to pictures
• the sparseness of sensory experience
03. Anatomy of a Hoax
• piecing together the fragments
04. The Inconstant Imagination
• the lost world
• perception and imagination
• the cautionary tale of Herbert Graf
05. Inventing Feelings
• making sense of our ambiguous selves
• the interpretation of feeling
• love from a high bridge
• finding meaning in our lives
06. Manufacturing Choice
• on not knowing our own minds
• shaped by stories
• choosing and rejecting
Part II: The Improvised Mind
07. The Cycle of Thought
• prodding the conscious brain
• four principles of the cycle of thought
08. The Narrow Channel of Consciousness
• the ‘fate’ of unattended information
• dividing the brain
09. The Myth of Unconscious Thought
• one task at a time
• one memory at a time
10. The Boundary of Consciousness
• consciousness in perception
• the stream of consciousness, revisited
• consciousness of the inner self?
• rethinking the boundary of consciousness
• the unconscious mind that isn’t
• from spiky spheres to the meaning of life
11. Precedent not Principles
• the strange case of chess
• perception–memory resonance
• people as traditions
• precedents not principles
12. The Secret of Intelligence
• the ubiquity of metaphor
• imagination and intelligence
• the distant prospect of intelligent machines
Epilogue: Reinventing Ourselves
Notes
Contents
Chater N (2018) (07:26) Mind Is Flat, The - The Illusion of Mental Depth and The Improvised Mind
Prologue: Literary Depth, Mental Shallows
Part I: The Illusion of Mental Depth
01. The Power of Invention
• artificial intelligence and the ‘inner oracle’
• the illusion of explanatory depth
• true believers in the inner oracle
• psychology: art or science?
02. The Feeling of Reality
• from words to pictures
• the sparseness of sensory experience
03. Anatomy of a Hoax
• piecing together the fragments
04. The Inconstant Imagination
• the lost world
• perception and imagination
• the cautionary tale of Herbert Graf
05. Inventing Feelings
• making sense of our ambiguous selves
• the interpretation of feeling
• love from a high bridge
• finding meaning in our lives
06. Manufacturing Choice
• on not knowing our own minds
• shaped by stories
• choosing and rejecting
Part II: The Improvised Mind
07. The Cycle of Thought
• prodding the conscious brain
• four principles of the cycle of thought
08. The Narrow Channel of Consciousness
• the ‘fate’ of unattended information
• dividing the brain
09. The Myth of Unconscious Thought
• one task at a time
• one memory at a time
10. The Boundary of Consciousness
• consciousness in perception
• the stream of consciousness, revisited
• consciousness of the inner self?
• rethinking the boundary of consciousness
• the unconscious mind that isn’t
• from spiky spheres to the meaning of life
11. Precedent not Principles
• the strange case of chess
• perception–memory resonance
• people as traditions
• precedents not principles
12. The Secret of Intelligence
• the ubiquity of metaphor
• imagination and intelligence
• the distant prospect of intelligent machines
Epilogue: Reinventing Ourselves
Notes
March 12, 2021
Another okay book by a scientist trying to defend a full theory of his field of expertise. Lots of cool experiments and data, some mind-blowing facts about perception (particularly vision) and a very lackluster case for mind reductionism. I don't even blame scientists anymore; they are simply filling in a void that used to be occupied by philosophers with the courage and interest to venture outside of commentaries of commentaries and into a critical and systematic analysis of the fields of knowledge.
More specifically, the book simply does not prove the thesis it was supposed to do in any way. The only argument consists in baseless extrapolation from the (convincingly shown) lack of "depth" in perception. Nick Charter also fails to consider seriously the possibility that the confabulating mind that is bound by previous experiences (two qualities he also proves convincingly) can give rise to a substantial mind through a process of emergence. In fact, he mentions this relationship between memory and stability many times, but simply doesn't explore the link or its repercussions. Finally, the importance of public beliefs in creating stability over time is not explored at all.
Cool book if you want to learn about how perception and the mind work from an expert in the field. Really bad book if you want a convincing argument for mental reductionism.
More specifically, the book simply does not prove the thesis it was supposed to do in any way. The only argument consists in baseless extrapolation from the (convincingly shown) lack of "depth" in perception. Nick Charter also fails to consider seriously the possibility that the confabulating mind that is bound by previous experiences (two qualities he also proves convincingly) can give rise to a substantial mind through a process of emergence. In fact, he mentions this relationship between memory and stability many times, but simply doesn't explore the link or its repercussions. Finally, the importance of public beliefs in creating stability over time is not explored at all.
Cool book if you want to learn about how perception and the mind work from an expert in the field. Really bad book if you want a convincing argument for mental reductionism.
December 11, 2022
The human brain is like a _camera obscura_ with a big parallel processor attached, plus lots of memory storage.
We have the illusion of perceiving the world directly as it is. But of course that can't be right. Our brain is encased in a dark skull, its only information about the outside world coming from our five senses.
Visual perception in particular is amazingly narrow, with sharp focus and color vision confined to a small fraction of the eye. (Having developed vision problems in the past few years, I'm now quite aware of this.) We think we see entire rooms and even vast landscapes at a glance only because our eyes move swiftly and lock onto anything that captures our interest at the moment.
Attention seems to work the same way. We imagine that we're focusing on many things at once. But repeated experiments have shown otherwise. One terrifying experiment in flight simulation found that some pilots who were focusing on an instrument display entirely failed to notice another plane entering the runway ahead of them as they were landing their virtual planes. Again, we have the illusion of attentional breadth because the brain can smoothly shift from one focus of attention to another, rather than because it can focus on multiple things at once.
Our brains are constantly monitoring the world (and our own internal states), predicting what comes next. They have an amazing ability to retrieve memories and past interpretations of events, applying them to the event of the moment. We can also apply memories and sensations from one realm of experience to another, which is why we're good at metaphor. So life is a journey, anger is a tempest, and all the world's a stage.
We have no access to most of what our brains are doing. The brain operates as a network, with about a hundred trillion connections among nearly 100 million neurons. The things that make it to the level of conscious thought represent only a tiny fraction of the brain's activity. Which is fortunate, since we'd quickly lose the plot if we had to keep track of all those millions of neurons.
Unconscious thought probably is not happening. Given the interconnected nature of the brain, it would be very difficult to have a second, subterranean (catch that metaphor?) thought process going on below the conscious level. The connections would soon get hopelessly crossed. There's a lot of processing going on below our awareness, but it's probably not anything we could reasonably call "thought." It's also hard to see why nature would create a whole unconscious thought process in any case. She's in the business of survival, not existential contemplation.
Physical sensations have to be interpreted, and those interpretations often are flexible. Is that surge of adrenaline fear or excitement? Is that sluggish feeling sadness or fatigue? We probably shouldn't get too fixated on any one interpretation because our explanation of the moment can often be wrong or incomplete.
Our mental visualizations are creative and wide-ranging, but also remarkably sketchy and incoherent. We can create entire fictional worlds in our minds that could never exist in the real world. Which is why followers of fantasy fiction have created a cottage industry devoted to pointing out the inconsistencies in fictional works (try as they might, authors will probably never be able to avoid these unless they build actual, real-world replicas of their fictional creations).
So be skeptical when René Descartes claims he has a clear and distinct idea of God. In reality, he probably didn't even have a clear and distinct idea of the tree outside his window, because none of us do. How tall is that tree exactly? How smooth is the bark? Does it still have leaves clinging on in December? How many? What kind of shadow is it casting? All of this can be answered, but we don't need to know any of it to register that a tree is there. And that's just the point. Our brain doesn't overload us with information we don't need, but it also cannot give us anything like a full picture of the world.
This book is probably wrong in parts, but mostly on the right track. Our understanding of the human brain is still very partial, so future discoveries are likely to reveal unexpected new insights. In neuroscience, maybe more than any other field, it's important to remember every science writer's favorite tagline: More research is needed!
We have the illusion of perceiving the world directly as it is. But of course that can't be right. Our brain is encased in a dark skull, its only information about the outside world coming from our five senses.
Visual perception in particular is amazingly narrow, with sharp focus and color vision confined to a small fraction of the eye. (Having developed vision problems in the past few years, I'm now quite aware of this.) We think we see entire rooms and even vast landscapes at a glance only because our eyes move swiftly and lock onto anything that captures our interest at the moment.
Attention seems to work the same way. We imagine that we're focusing on many things at once. But repeated experiments have shown otherwise. One terrifying experiment in flight simulation found that some pilots who were focusing on an instrument display entirely failed to notice another plane entering the runway ahead of them as they were landing their virtual planes. Again, we have the illusion of attentional breadth because the brain can smoothly shift from one focus of attention to another, rather than because it can focus on multiple things at once.
Our brains are constantly monitoring the world (and our own internal states), predicting what comes next. They have an amazing ability to retrieve memories and past interpretations of events, applying them to the event of the moment. We can also apply memories and sensations from one realm of experience to another, which is why we're good at metaphor. So life is a journey, anger is a tempest, and all the world's a stage.
We have no access to most of what our brains are doing. The brain operates as a network, with about a hundred trillion connections among nearly 100 million neurons. The things that make it to the level of conscious thought represent only a tiny fraction of the brain's activity. Which is fortunate, since we'd quickly lose the plot if we had to keep track of all those millions of neurons.
Unconscious thought probably is not happening. Given the interconnected nature of the brain, it would be very difficult to have a second, subterranean (catch that metaphor?) thought process going on below the conscious level. The connections would soon get hopelessly crossed. There's a lot of processing going on below our awareness, but it's probably not anything we could reasonably call "thought." It's also hard to see why nature would create a whole unconscious thought process in any case. She's in the business of survival, not existential contemplation.
Physical sensations have to be interpreted, and those interpretations often are flexible. Is that surge of adrenaline fear or excitement? Is that sluggish feeling sadness or fatigue? We probably shouldn't get too fixated on any one interpretation because our explanation of the moment can often be wrong or incomplete.
Our mental visualizations are creative and wide-ranging, but also remarkably sketchy and incoherent. We can create entire fictional worlds in our minds that could never exist in the real world. Which is why followers of fantasy fiction have created a cottage industry devoted to pointing out the inconsistencies in fictional works (try as they might, authors will probably never be able to avoid these unless they build actual, real-world replicas of their fictional creations).
So be skeptical when René Descartes claims he has a clear and distinct idea of God. In reality, he probably didn't even have a clear and distinct idea of the tree outside his window, because none of us do. How tall is that tree exactly? How smooth is the bark? Does it still have leaves clinging on in December? How many? What kind of shadow is it casting? All of this can be answered, but we don't need to know any of it to register that a tree is there. And that's just the point. Our brain doesn't overload us with information we don't need, but it also cannot give us anything like a full picture of the world.
This book is probably wrong in parts, but mostly on the right track. Our understanding of the human brain is still very partial, so future discoveries are likely to reveal unexpected new insights. In neuroscience, maybe more than any other field, it's important to remember every science writer's favorite tagline: More research is needed!
April 18, 2019
This is an important and original treatment on the mind. Okay, much has been written on the mind, and there are plenty of topics covered in this book that have been covered elsewhere, for instance Barrett's How Emotions Are Made (another excellent work), which is a nice complement to this book.
Chater's overarching theme is that there is not as much (or perhaps any) depth or meaning behind much of what we do than we tend to think. We are remarkably good at making up stories and fooling ourselves into thinking the process through which we come up with thoughts or ideas are the result of deep thought. In reality, he argues, our thoughts and emotions come from a synthesis of our past experiences and actions and reactions, and our brain makes instantaneous decisions based on its interpretation of our current state, and that makes up our consciousness. He even takes on Kahneman's system 1 and 2, basically saying there is no system 2 (though Kahneman used the 2 systems just as an analogy, not as fact).
He talked a bit about our ability to focus on just one thing at a time. When reading our eyes move and stop at certain intervals, they do not continuously move. This happens extremely quickly so we perceive continual movement, but our focus is actually on just one thing. In thinking about this the easy counterpoint is that when we drive we are often doing something else, perhaps having a conversation with someone. But, if a deer runs out in the road, our focus will go to the deer and the conversation will stop; our brain cannot focus on two things at once, and regular driving is something we are so good at it doesn't take any effort.
There is also no subconscious working on problems. For instance, when we can't remember the name of something, and it later comes to us in a flash, it is easy to think that our subconscious was busy working on it until it found it. But Chater argues the reason we couldn't remember at the time was we got caught in mental loops, and when we step out of those loops and sort of reset, then think about the subject again, we can remember it. Imagine we are given two simple math problems, perhaps simply adding a few numbers together. If we look at each problem and then focus on and solve one of the problems, our subconscious is not working on the other problem in the meantime, so that we already have the answer when we look back at the problem. No, we can only solve each problem by focusing on it.
I listened to the audiobook of this, and Chater also narrated it. He was not a good narrator as he did not always speak very clearly.
Chater's overarching theme is that there is not as much (or perhaps any) depth or meaning behind much of what we do than we tend to think. We are remarkably good at making up stories and fooling ourselves into thinking the process through which we come up with thoughts or ideas are the result of deep thought. In reality, he argues, our thoughts and emotions come from a synthesis of our past experiences and actions and reactions, and our brain makes instantaneous decisions based on its interpretation of our current state, and that makes up our consciousness. He even takes on Kahneman's system 1 and 2, basically saying there is no system 2 (though Kahneman used the 2 systems just as an analogy, not as fact).
He talked a bit about our ability to focus on just one thing at a time. When reading our eyes move and stop at certain intervals, they do not continuously move. This happens extremely quickly so we perceive continual movement, but our focus is actually on just one thing. In thinking about this the easy counterpoint is that when we drive we are often doing something else, perhaps having a conversation with someone. But, if a deer runs out in the road, our focus will go to the deer and the conversation will stop; our brain cannot focus on two things at once, and regular driving is something we are so good at it doesn't take any effort.
There is also no subconscious working on problems. For instance, when we can't remember the name of something, and it later comes to us in a flash, it is easy to think that our subconscious was busy working on it until it found it. But Chater argues the reason we couldn't remember at the time was we got caught in mental loops, and when we step out of those loops and sort of reset, then think about the subject again, we can remember it. Imagine we are given two simple math problems, perhaps simply adding a few numbers together. If we look at each problem and then focus on and solve one of the problems, our subconscious is not working on the other problem in the meantime, so that we already have the answer when we look back at the problem. No, we can only solve each problem by focusing on it.
I listened to the audiobook of this, and Chater also narrated it. He was not a good narrator as he did not always speak very clearly.
August 4, 2023
This book made my brain hurt.
It starts on a promising note but quickly becomes too vague to grasp.
I wouldn't recommend it.
It starts on a promising note but quickly becomes too vague to grasp.
I wouldn't recommend it.
May 5, 2021
If you believe, like many others, that there is a subconscious mind that is always churning, working in shrouded mystery, giving our thoughts and actions ulterior angles, that makes us much more than the sum of our moment-by-moment beliefs and actions, you've been living a tragic lie. In his book, Chater argues that our minds instead are nothing but vastly talented improvisors, inventing much of what we perceive at each second, stitching together our play-by-play account of the world as it goes along. The brain, because of its prodigious parallelization, can make rapid sense of a complex barrage of sensory input and mental workings, and yet it can only work on one thing at a time. And so the mind is this flat and shallow thing, but it's also vastly complex and adept at its primary task: making sense of the world and not getting its host-body eaten by lions. You lack depth, but we all do so it's OK.
The book reads well; Chater is an entertaining writer and it's easy to stay engaged. Like much other pop-sci, the text tends towards repetition, and the author's confidence in his claims are overflowing. And, like much other pop-sci, astute readers or those learned in this area will likely have questions or critiques. Chater really razes the mind: burns it down to an easily-duped, shallow swindler; for sure, this appears to be much more true than the mind as a Freudian funhouse of suppressed motives and shadow personalities. But, again like much other pop-sci, the claim is vaulted to, I'm afraid, an unsubstantiated height of truth.
For example, Chater shows us that our emotions precede beliefs, rather than the reverse (e.g. "I see a snake, I hate snakes, I get anxious/feel fear" is wrong; really it is "I see a snake, I get anxious/feel fear, I interpret this as me hating snakes"). The book draws on experiments involving attraction to the opposite sex, wherein subjects attribute exhilaration or anxiety spurred by a concurrent though unrelated stimulus (walking across a high bridge while looking at a prospective mate at the other end) as heightened attraction towards that mate. This is certainly plausible and evidently happens, but are we to conclude that our attraction is mostly a ruse? Mostly a mis-attribution? Chater argues as much, but it seems like too much: surely there is initial attraction (or else there is no point in placing a prospective mate at the other end of the bridge...why not a rock?) And this initial attraction comes from somewhere, likely our sexual arousal upon seeing our mate, in which case our minds attributing feelings of attraction to this arousal seems totally appropriate and above board. In other words, some perception is "true to ourselves", whatever that's supposed to mean in neurology circles.
Another example that is passed over quickly has to do with whether the mind really "works on" stuff in the "background" while we're doing other things. We almost all have an impression that this sort of thing happens from time to time. The experiment that was conducted involved having subjects name as many foods then as many countries as they could; when they got suck on one, they'd move to the other. The idea is that if our brains are capable of working in the background, when I return to naming foods, say, after my hiatus naming countries, I should have a fresh store of names that my brain has quietly prepared for me. This doesn't happen, and Chater concludes that *no* background processing ever goes on in the brain. I'm no neuroscientist, but that does not seem like an apt conclusion. For one, the two naming tasks are quite likely using the same mental "machinery" and, so, yeah, food gets off while countries gets on. But what about two totally unrelated tasks? Like naming foods and solving a math problem? That would be more interesting and worthy of the conclusions drawn.
Finally, the book doesn't say enough about what *is* constant in your mind from moment-to-moment. Surely there is knowledge, memories. Indeed, memories as we invoke them are colored by the moment, re-perceived as Chater explains. But there is a seed of something there, and how that all works and interacts with the improvising mind seems left out.
The implications of this book for how we view our own lives are far-reaching (there are no deep reasons for anything we do or say); and the implications for technologies like artificial intelligence are equally decisive. There is no vast store of beliefs and impressions that we draw on to reason about things, and early AI research met with failure because it assumed this from the outset. As someone interested in both AI and not reading too much into my own actions, these are interesting revelations, to say the least.
The book reads well; Chater is an entertaining writer and it's easy to stay engaged. Like much other pop-sci, the text tends towards repetition, and the author's confidence in his claims are overflowing. And, like much other pop-sci, astute readers or those learned in this area will likely have questions or critiques. Chater really razes the mind: burns it down to an easily-duped, shallow swindler; for sure, this appears to be much more true than the mind as a Freudian funhouse of suppressed motives and shadow personalities. But, again like much other pop-sci, the claim is vaulted to, I'm afraid, an unsubstantiated height of truth.
For example, Chater shows us that our emotions precede beliefs, rather than the reverse (e.g. "I see a snake, I hate snakes, I get anxious/feel fear" is wrong; really it is "I see a snake, I get anxious/feel fear, I interpret this as me hating snakes"). The book draws on experiments involving attraction to the opposite sex, wherein subjects attribute exhilaration or anxiety spurred by a concurrent though unrelated stimulus (walking across a high bridge while looking at a prospective mate at the other end) as heightened attraction towards that mate. This is certainly plausible and evidently happens, but are we to conclude that our attraction is mostly a ruse? Mostly a mis-attribution? Chater argues as much, but it seems like too much: surely there is initial attraction (or else there is no point in placing a prospective mate at the other end of the bridge...why not a rock?) And this initial attraction comes from somewhere, likely our sexual arousal upon seeing our mate, in which case our minds attributing feelings of attraction to this arousal seems totally appropriate and above board. In other words, some perception is "true to ourselves", whatever that's supposed to mean in neurology circles.
Another example that is passed over quickly has to do with whether the mind really "works on" stuff in the "background" while we're doing other things. We almost all have an impression that this sort of thing happens from time to time. The experiment that was conducted involved having subjects name as many foods then as many countries as they could; when they got suck on one, they'd move to the other. The idea is that if our brains are capable of working in the background, when I return to naming foods, say, after my hiatus naming countries, I should have a fresh store of names that my brain has quietly prepared for me. This doesn't happen, and Chater concludes that *no* background processing ever goes on in the brain. I'm no neuroscientist, but that does not seem like an apt conclusion. For one, the two naming tasks are quite likely using the same mental "machinery" and, so, yeah, food gets off while countries gets on. But what about two totally unrelated tasks? Like naming foods and solving a math problem? That would be more interesting and worthy of the conclusions drawn.
Finally, the book doesn't say enough about what *is* constant in your mind from moment-to-moment. Surely there is knowledge, memories. Indeed, memories as we invoke them are colored by the moment, re-perceived as Chater explains. But there is a seed of something there, and how that all works and interacts with the improvising mind seems left out.
The implications of this book for how we view our own lives are far-reaching (there are no deep reasons for anything we do or say); and the implications for technologies like artificial intelligence are equally decisive. There is no vast store of beliefs and impressions that we draw on to reason about things, and early AI research met with failure because it assumed this from the outset. As someone interested in both AI and not reading too much into my own actions, these are interesting revelations, to say the least.
January 2, 2020
This is a fascinating book. Broadly I buy the main argument: that mental depth mostly an illusion. Consciousness is not a stream, it's a series of frames. We don't have any beliefs or values that are more real, more true, more "deep down". The tip of the iceberg and the submerged iceberg are made of a completely different material. Sure.
While I found the book well researched and mostly well-argued (aside from the chapter of emotion which I felt didn't give the questions raised the attention they deserved) I also found the book lacking in many ways. One could accuse the book of being repetitive, but I think that's only half of it. The thesis is important and it's a perspective that has deep ramifications in many domains, so I think covering each domain is justified. However, I think the author should have prioritized clarifying exactly what perspective he was trying to discredit. Talking about "the unconscious" or "the subconscious" can mean many different things depending on who you ask.
My two cents is that even in a flat-mind cycle of thought perspective a lot of what's talked about as "unconscious" motivations can be relevant. The book draws mainly on the science of perception, but psychology is a wider subject like that. I remember reading that the original meaning of "repressed" was closer to "disavowed" or "unacknowledged". Some impulses enter our conscious mind and are rejected without being integrated into our narrative of our selves. There's also the question as to why certain interpretations and arises - a question that seems to become more complicated when those interpretations regard the interpersonal instead of the perceptual.
Still, the main thesis of the book is important. It does thoroughly debunk a certain interpretation of the unconscious (separate subpersonalities living their own lives beneath the surface). And while I think it leaves the most interesting questions unanswered I also see that that's a bit much to demand from one book. I especially appreciated the last two chapters on intelligence that seemed to have a bit more of a constructive focus.
The book is kind of dry but the interestingness of its material makes up for it. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in psychology, but I think the book is more rewarding to someone with some background knowledge of alternative perspective the book is trying to debunk.
While I found the book well researched and mostly well-argued (aside from the chapter of emotion which I felt didn't give the questions raised the attention they deserved) I also found the book lacking in many ways. One could accuse the book of being repetitive, but I think that's only half of it. The thesis is important and it's a perspective that has deep ramifications in many domains, so I think covering each domain is justified. However, I think the author should have prioritized clarifying exactly what perspective he was trying to discredit. Talking about "the unconscious" or "the subconscious" can mean many different things depending on who you ask.
My two cents is that even in a flat-mind cycle of thought perspective a lot of what's talked about as "unconscious" motivations can be relevant. The book draws mainly on the science of perception, but psychology is a wider subject like that. I remember reading that the original meaning of "repressed" was closer to "disavowed" or "unacknowledged". Some impulses enter our conscious mind and are rejected without being integrated into our narrative of our selves. There's also the question as to why certain interpretations and arises - a question that seems to become more complicated when those interpretations regard the interpersonal instead of the perceptual.
Still, the main thesis of the book is important. It does thoroughly debunk a certain interpretation of the unconscious (separate subpersonalities living their own lives beneath the surface). And while I think it leaves the most interesting questions unanswered I also see that that's a bit much to demand from one book. I especially appreciated the last two chapters on intelligence that seemed to have a bit more of a constructive focus.
The book is kind of dry but the interestingness of its material makes up for it. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in psychology, but I think the book is more rewarding to someone with some background knowledge of alternative perspective the book is trying to debunk.
September 14, 2019
The author asserts that our intuitive sense that we have a submerged consciousness that mirrors our waking conscious mind is wrong. What we have is a collaborative computing system that lies below consciousness comprised of snippets of interpretation that can be drawn upon to interpret the current sense experience in an open-ended, complex world. In our waking consciousness, the mind makes it up as it goes along and there are not principles or an "inner child" upon which we rely for our decisions and perspectives.
An intriguing hypothesis poorly and incompletely presented. The Grand Illusion of our mind's interpretation of the world is not a new concept and Chater's point that there are not a useful and duplicative set of thoughts that lie below the surface of our awareness makes sense. The lack of inner principles, or the "flat mind" in his terminology, is an interesting idea. However, the author just keeps stating the same thing repeatedly using various viewpoints that may point to the same conclusion. Then the book just ends. A peeve of mine is this genre of "The One Most Astonishing Thing That You Didn't Know" format of popular psychology books that illustrates a point for which the purpose seems to be simply to get our attention and inspire a book purchase. Its a complex form of clickbait.
What are the implications of the hypothesis in our day to day world? How long does it take to rewire our assumptions if we move our attention to them? What techniques of addressing our interpretations work better than others given this model? Why does understanding the mind in this way even matter? What are the implications to the world of psychology? AI? The author leaves many of these questions only minimally addressed if mentioned at all. These questions are the interesting bit, not the experimentation on the left and right hemispheres and the study results that arose from it.
I am not attacking the ideas. I am pointing out that the format and presentation, in my interpretation based on drawing on past snippets of my interpretations, is one that highlights the sensational nature of the hypothesis without addressing at all why this matters.
An intriguing hypothesis poorly and incompletely presented. The Grand Illusion of our mind's interpretation of the world is not a new concept and Chater's point that there are not a useful and duplicative set of thoughts that lie below the surface of our awareness makes sense. The lack of inner principles, or the "flat mind" in his terminology, is an interesting idea. However, the author just keeps stating the same thing repeatedly using various viewpoints that may point to the same conclusion. Then the book just ends. A peeve of mine is this genre of "The One Most Astonishing Thing That You Didn't Know" format of popular psychology books that illustrates a point for which the purpose seems to be simply to get our attention and inspire a book purchase. Its a complex form of clickbait.
What are the implications of the hypothesis in our day to day world? How long does it take to rewire our assumptions if we move our attention to them? What techniques of addressing our interpretations work better than others given this model? Why does understanding the mind in this way even matter? What are the implications to the world of psychology? AI? The author leaves many of these questions only minimally addressed if mentioned at all. These questions are the interesting bit, not the experimentation on the left and right hemispheres and the study results that arose from it.
I am not attacking the ideas. I am pointing out that the format and presentation, in my interpretation based on drawing on past snippets of my interpretations, is one that highlights the sensational nature of the hypothesis without addressing at all why this matters.
August 5, 2023
I still struggle to grasp the book's central claim, as it does not offer a synthesis of related works, nor does it provide an alternate explanation of the world. Instead, it focuses heavily on questioning, without offering concrete alternative explanations, and uses magic tricks as evidence.
I concur that there's a reason 'Freud' and 'fraud' sound alike. I don't believe the unconscious or subconscious is a mystical, infinitely deep place. I think our understanding of ourselves would have progressed more rapidly without Freud's influence.
However, the author goes to the other extreme, suggesting that we're essentially a hive of bees, improvising randomly as we go. As an engineer, I'm familiar with conceptualizing complex solutions without knowing all the details in advance. I understand the direction but not every step leading there. The author seems to interpret this as random wandering, lacking depth or purpose, merely striving for self-consistency.
What's more, it's not just that I'm unsure of his claim; I'm unclear on how it's supposed to change any of my pre-existing beliefs. His argument is vague, shallow, and non-falsifiable.
He conspicuously avoids topics like dreams, memories, autistic savants, gender-based differences, animal models, child versus adult cognition, and other challenging subjects where he would need to explain and defend his theory.
To me, the simplest explanation isn't that the mind is shallow, unpredictable, irrational, or flat. Rather, as Kahneman suggested, we often answer a different question than the one posed. If asked how you imagine a pet zebra would behave, you'd likely describe a striped dog. We generally respond to a slightly altered question, and these artificial experiments don't necessarily demonstrate what they claim to...
I concur that there's a reason 'Freud' and 'fraud' sound alike. I don't believe the unconscious or subconscious is a mystical, infinitely deep place. I think our understanding of ourselves would have progressed more rapidly without Freud's influence.
However, the author goes to the other extreme, suggesting that we're essentially a hive of bees, improvising randomly as we go. As an engineer, I'm familiar with conceptualizing complex solutions without knowing all the details in advance. I understand the direction but not every step leading there. The author seems to interpret this as random wandering, lacking depth or purpose, merely striving for self-consistency.
What's more, it's not just that I'm unsure of his claim; I'm unclear on how it's supposed to change any of my pre-existing beliefs. His argument is vague, shallow, and non-falsifiable.
He conspicuously avoids topics like dreams, memories, autistic savants, gender-based differences, animal models, child versus adult cognition, and other challenging subjects where he would need to explain and defend his theory.
To me, the simplest explanation isn't that the mind is shallow, unpredictable, irrational, or flat. Rather, as Kahneman suggested, we often answer a different question than the one posed. If asked how you imagine a pet zebra would behave, you'd likely describe a striped dog. We generally respond to a slightly altered question, and these artificial experiments don't necessarily demonstrate what they claim to...
July 16, 2019
The author has a strong perspective but little fresh evidence. Rather, this is a collection of research studies narrated by the perspective that the brain is incapable of processing more than one thing a time, that it manufactures rather than presents “reality,” and that there is no unconscious mind influencing our lives—just responses in the moment that are influenced by prior ways we’ve responded to things.
None of this is really controversial. But the author overreaches and contradicts himself. Yes, research shows that the brain does certain tasks sequentially, but does mean it does all tasks sequentially? And yes, the concept of an unconscious mind influencing our decisions may be an inappropriate metaphor, but isn’t the author’s conception of prior decisions creating patterns in the brain that influence future decisions essentially the same thing as an unconscious mind, given that it means we make many decisions without knowing the true reason why? Isn’t he just providing a mechanism for how things we’re not conscious of influence our lives?
Overall, the book summarizes some interesting research, but it’s full of hyperbole and unsubstantiated claims. It would be better if the author put this forward as a true theory, including falsifiable predictions of the theory, rather than writing a manifesto against a straw man of what I sense most people marginally knowledgeable about current neuroscience actually believe.
None of this is really controversial. But the author overreaches and contradicts himself. Yes, research shows that the brain does certain tasks sequentially, but does mean it does all tasks sequentially? And yes, the concept of an unconscious mind influencing our decisions may be an inappropriate metaphor, but isn’t the author’s conception of prior decisions creating patterns in the brain that influence future decisions essentially the same thing as an unconscious mind, given that it means we make many decisions without knowing the true reason why? Isn’t he just providing a mechanism for how things we’re not conscious of influence our lives?
Overall, the book summarizes some interesting research, but it’s full of hyperbole and unsubstantiated claims. It would be better if the author put this forward as a true theory, including falsifiable predictions of the theory, rather than writing a manifesto against a straw man of what I sense most people marginally knowledgeable about current neuroscience actually believe.
May 29, 2022
I was disappointed in this book. There was little new. It was poorly argued. It was weakly written. There are a few granular findings about cognitive psychology, especially around colour perception. There is some talk of the underdetermined nature of somatic markers.
He then talks about how these sense impressions delude "the mind" into a perception of "mental depth", without explaining what the mind is, how it can be deceived or what is "mental depth".
There is a nod to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature but Rorty engages in exactly the sort of analytic inquiry that this book doesn't.
All this has been done before, and much better and more persuasively, in Consciousness Explained and Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain.
Nothing (new) to see here.
He then talks about how these sense impressions delude "the mind" into a perception of "mental depth", without explaining what the mind is, how it can be deceived or what is "mental depth".
There is a nod to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature but Rorty engages in exactly the sort of analytic inquiry that this book doesn't.
All this has been done before, and much better and more persuasively, in Consciousness Explained and Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain.
Nothing (new) to see here.
September 26, 2019
Interesante libro que desmonta muchos mitos populares de la psicología (especialmente, mitos freudianos). No existe un subconsciente, ni un "ente" oculto que explique nuestros pensamientos y nuestra conducta. La mente es, como reza el título, plana.
Nuestro cerebro es un paisaje tallado por pensamientos previos que guían, con su huella, los pensamientos actuales. Somos grandes improvisadores porque las respuestas que generamos en cada momento no provienen de ninguna "profundidad", no preexisten, no están almacenadas en ningún lugar de nuestra mente... son creaciones instantáneas basadas en el hábito y la inferencia estadística.
Muy interesante lo que cuenta sobre la memoria: sólo recordamos y procesamos aquello que somos capaces de interpretar (aquello a lo que le asignamos un significado) pero nunca recordamos el estímulo perceptivo per se. Si alguien nos dice una frase, recordamos su contenido, su significado, no la secuencia de palabras exacta (o su sonido). Para percibir debemos interpretar. Todo lo que no es interpretado, es olvidado o ignorado.
Nuestro cerebro es un paisaje tallado por pensamientos previos que guían, con su huella, los pensamientos actuales. Somos grandes improvisadores porque las respuestas que generamos en cada momento no provienen de ninguna "profundidad", no preexisten, no están almacenadas en ningún lugar de nuestra mente... son creaciones instantáneas basadas en el hábito y la inferencia estadística.
Muy interesante lo que cuenta sobre la memoria: sólo recordamos y procesamos aquello que somos capaces de interpretar (aquello a lo que le asignamos un significado) pero nunca recordamos el estímulo perceptivo per se. Si alguien nos dice una frase, recordamos su contenido, su significado, no la secuencia de palabras exacta (o su sonido). Para percibir debemos interpretar. Todo lo que no es interpretado, es olvidado o ignorado.
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