The Mind is Flat

Launched with what may be the most engaging prologue of any work of nonfiction, the reader of The Mind is Flat is taken on a fascinating intellectual journey. Chater first compels us to leave behind widely-accepted views about the depth of the mind, abandoning the cherished idea that thinking is rooted in the depths of unconscious thought. But far from depriving the life of the mind of its charm, magic or meaning, Chater introduces us to a new appreciation of the brain's remarkable propensity and capacity to make sense of experience. While the mind may indeed be flat in the sense it is 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

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 Things That Made the Modern Economy and The Undercover Economist

A total assault on all lingering psychiatric and psychoanalytic notions of mental depths to be plumbed. For Chater, surface is everything ... Light the touchpaper and stand well back

'The ideas driving 2018', New Scientist

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

Josh Tenenbaum, Professor of Cognitive Science and Computation at MIT

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

A superb exposition of scientific findings

Steven Poole, Guardian

It'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

Thomas W. Hodgkinson, The Spectator