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Sign up todayThe Mind is Flat
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Learn morePenguin presents the audiobook edition of The Mind is Flat written and read by Nick Chater.
Most of us assume that our thoughts, desires and behaviour arise from the murky depths of our minds, and, if only we could access this inner world, we could truly understand ourselves. For more than a century, psychologists, psychiatrists and neuroscientists have struggled, using methods from psychotherapy to brain scans, to discover what lies below the surface of our minds.
In a profound reappraisal of how the mind works, pre-eminent behavioural scientist Nick Chater reveals that this entire enterprise is misguided: that we have no mental depths to plumb. Drawing on startling new research in neuroscience, behavioural psychology and perception, The Mind is Flat shows that we have no inner library of beliefs, values and desires lying with us, but instead generate them in the moment, and base them entirely on our past experiences. As the reader discovers - through eye-opening experiments and mind-bending visual examples - we are all characters of our own creation, constantly improvising our behaviour, rather than the playthings of unconscious currents within us.
Boldly original and utterly convincing, The Mind is Flat forces us to reconsider just about everything we thought we knew about ourselves, and shows that the result can be liberating.
Nick Chater is Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School. He founded WBS's Behavioural Science group, which is the largest of its kind in Europe, advises the UK's Behavioural Insights Team and was scientist-in-residence on the BBC Radio 4 series The Human Zoo. He is a member of the UK Committee on Climate Change, and a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and the British Academy. In 2019 The Mind Is Flat won the American Association of Publishers' PROSE Award for Best Book in Clinical Psychology.
Nick Chater is Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School. He founded WBS's Behavioural Science group, which is the largest of its kind in Europe, advises the UK's Behavioural Insights Team and was scientist-in-residence on the BBC Radio 4 series The Human Zoo. He is a member of the UK Committee on Climate Change, and a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and the British Academy. In 2019 The Mind Is Flat won the American Association of Publishers' PROSE Award for Best Book in Clinical Psychology.
Reviews
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 A superb exposition of scientific findingsIt's a triumph in itself that Chater has written a book about cognition that is as gripping as a thriller. 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 . . .
Brilliant . . . beautifully written . . . you'll be able to bored your relatives rigid with your new theories of cognition over the Christmas turkey
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