The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain

Review
“A superb exposition of scientific findings.”—Steven Poole, The Guardian
"This is a total assault on all lingering psychiatric and psychoanalytic notions of mental depths to be plumbed. For Chater, surface is everything: we are all characters of our own creation, busily creating and improvising our behaviour based on experience. Light the touchpaper and stand well back . . ."—Liz Else, New Scientist
“One of the most interesting books on the mind I have read.” —Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution blog
“The book’s sweeping investigation and hoax polemic is engaging.”—Choice
Winner of the 2019 PROSE awards, clinical psychology category
“An astonishing achievement. Nick Chater has blown my mind—as well as assuring me that my brain just doesn’t work the way I think it does. I haven’t been able to stop talking about the ideas in this book.”—Tim Harford, author of Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy and The Undercover Economist
“While the mind may indeed be flat in the sense of devoid of unconscious ruminations, reading this book leaves us with a much deeper, transformed, understanding of our own thoughts and feelings and of how we perceive the definitively non-flat world in which we live.”—George Loewenstein, author of Exotic Preferences: Behavioral Economics and Human Motivation
“This is a remarkable book. Every other book about the mind will tell you either why we’re so dumb, or why we’re so smart. Chater offers a single elegant theory to explain both: why our minds so often let us down and confound us, at the same time that they far surpass our current attempts to build intelligence in machines.”—Joshua Tenenbaum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
"We live with the belief that our lives make sense; that there is deeper meaning guiding our psyches and behavior. In this brilliant book, Nick Chater argues this is just an illusion. Our quest for meaning is misguided because our interpretations are shallow and fleeting."—Steven Sloman, co-author of The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone
“The mind may be flat but this book is a fascinating, rounded and radical approach to understanding how we think and act. The implications for understanding human decision making are profound. Everyone who enjoyed Thinking, Fast and Slow must read this book.”—Gus O'Donnell, former Cabinet Secretary and Chair of the Behavioural Insights Team Advisory Board