The Mind Is Flat, Nick Chater
The Mind Is Flat, Nick Chater
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The Mind Is Flat
The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain

Author: Nick Chater

Narrator: Nick Chater

Unabridged: 7 hr 26 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/06/2018


Synopsis

In a radical reinterpretation of how the mind works, an eminent behavioral scientist reveals the illusion of mental depth

Psychologists and neuroscientists struggle with how best to interpret human motivation and decision making. The assumption is that below a mental "surface" of conscious awareness lies a deep and complex set of inner beliefs, values, and desires that govern our thoughts, ideas, and actions, and that to know this depth is to know ourselves.

In this profoundly original book, behavioral scientist Nick Chater contends just the opposite: rather than being the plaything of unconscious currents, the brain generates behaviors in the moment based entirely on our past experiences. Engaging the listener with eye-opening experiments, the author first demolishes our intuitive sense of how our mind works, then argues for a positive interpretation of the brain as a ceaseless and creative improviser.

About Nick Chater

Nick Chater is professor of behavioral science at Warwick Business School and cofounder of the research consultancy Decision Technology Ltd. He has contributed to more than two hundred articles and book chapters and is the author, coauthor, or coeditor of fourteen books.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Alla

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 mean......more

Goodreads review by Ramón

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 profund......more

Goodreads review by Douglas

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",......more

Goodreads review by Alex

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 do......more