You probably think you have beliefs, desires, fears, a personality, an 'inner life', maybe even a subconscious. Poppycock, says Nick Chater, a behavioural psychologist. All that stuff is folk nonsense...The book could equally have been called The Mind Is Shallow, though potential readers might have found that more off-puttingly rude ... This is one of those books that is a superb exposition of scientific findings, from which the author proceeds to draw highly polemical and speculative inferences. There are beautiful discussions of how little we actually see around us: eye-tracking software can show us a page filled with Xs with one word positioned exactly where we are looking , and we have the experience of seeing a full page of text.
Reading The Mind is Flat is like watching The Truman Show and realising, while you’re watching it, that you are Truman ... (Chater's) easeful prose takes its place in the humane, Humean tradition of British empiricist philosophy, moving with clarity and composure towards its revolutionary goal. It’s a triumph in itself that he has written a book about cognition that is as gripping as a thriller. I’m serious about this. You feel compelled to turn the pages to find out how it ends. In fact, I would go even further. If you can measure a book by how often you find yourself bringing it up in conversation, then The Mind is Flat is one of the best I’ve ever read.
