Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain

Our thoughts are not shadows of an alternative inner reality, to be charted and discovered; they are fictions of our own devising, created moment by moment.

But the problem with our everyday view of our minds is far deeper: no one, at any point in human history, has ever been guided by inner beliefs or desires, any more than any human being has been possessed by evil spirits or watched over by a guardian angel.

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

Indeed, psychologists have a phrase, ‘the illusion of explanatory depth’, for the bizarre contrast between our feeling of understanding and our inability to produce cogent explanations.

What is, and should be, controversial is the proposal that our theory of the calculations that the brain carries out match up, in some fairly direct way, with our common-sense psychological explanation in terms of beliefs and desires and the like – a viewpoint that has been widely held ever since early computational models of the mind took hold in

In this book, I want to convince you that the mind is flat: that the very idea of mental depth is an illusion. The mind is, instead, a consummate improviser, inventing actions, and beliefs and desires to explain those actions, with wonderful fluidity. But these momentary inventions are flimsy, fragmented and self-contradictory; they are like a film

An improvising mind, unmoored from stable beliefs and desires, might seem to be a recipe for mental chaos. I shall argue that the opposite is true: the very task of our improvising mind is to make our thoughts and behaviour as coherent as possible – to stay ‘in character’ as well as we are able.

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

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