Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain

This makes no sense if we make our choices by referring to some inner oracle, but it makes perfect sense if we are improvising: conjuring up reasons, in the moment, to justify one choice or another. Choosing and rejecting the same thing seems peculiar.

If we are asked to choose an option, we mostly focus on reasons for choosing one thing or another: and these reasons will tend to be positive reasons in favour of one option or the other. The extreme option has the most powerful positive reasons (e.g. a very close relationship with the child), so it wins out. If, on the other hand, we are asked to

What is going on here? Shafir and Tversky argued that when we make choices, we are not ‘expressing’ a pre-existing preference at all; indeed, they would argue that there are no such preferences. What we are doing instead is improvising – making up our preferences as we go along.

To make the most sense of my own behaviour, I will aim to think and act as I did before.

So wondering if you are in love, whether you really believe in God, or whether you find a sentimental pop song charming or mawkish, should be a prompt for you to consider how your thoughts and feelings fit together; how they link with your actions and the actions of other people; how they compare with situations you have experienced in the past, an

The psychology of perception and emotion suggests that we should look for the truth about love not by attempting an impossible journey into our innermost selves, but by focusing instead on our patterns of thought and interaction in the here and now. Feeling fond of the other, helping and being helped in return, sharing revelations, surges of adrena

The danger is that one moment’s speculative thought (‘I don’t love Alys’, ‘I’m a hopeless failure’, ‘the world is terrifying’) becomes the next moment’s incontrovertible proof – the very thought is taken as its own justification.

Walking across the high bridge, the fear of heights caused a surge of adrenaline in the male bridge-crossers. And the adrenaline was still washing around each unsuspecting male’s system when he met the attractive female experimenter. In the normal course of events, the extra adrenaline would probably be explained, reasonably enough, as a fear respo

What Schachter and Singer showed is that we interpret the same physiological state not merely as different versions of the same emotion (e.g. being envious of different things) but as examples of different emotions entirely (anger versus elation). And this is perhaps surprising because it suggests that our ‘read-out’ of our physiological state – th