Book of the dayScience and nature booksReviewThere is no subconscious, no ‘inner life’ that holds the secret of understanding ourselves, argues a behavioural psychologist. We improvise and can changeYou 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 brain essentially just makes everything up as it goes along – including what we fondly think of as our direct perceptions of the world, which are a patchwork of guesses and reconstructions. There is nothing going on “underneath”; there are no depths. 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. We can’t even see two or more colours at once but switch between one at a time. In general, our richness of experience seems to be a construct.
Feelings are not much cop, either. Emotions are probably generated when we notice changes in our bodily state (this was William James’s insight in the 19th century), rather than bubbling up from some subconscious to teach us a lesson. Memory is a highly fallible re-creation rather than a retrieval of information, and political affiliations can be influenced by cognitive biases. People commonly report, meanwhile, that a solution to some puzzle pops into their head after they have stopped working on it and taken a walk or a shower. But Chater insists that there is never any “unconscious processing” working on some problem while we do something else. In his view, the brain can attend to only one thing at a time.
A ‘belief’ is not an unchanging structure within the brain, but more a disposition to act in certain waysFrom all this he concludes that our feeling of having settled desires, beliefs, opinions and so forth is just a “hoax” the brain plays on us. But such language is contradictory: who exactly can be the victim of such a hoax, if there is no persistent person in there? Much of his book is quite compatible with the “no-self” views found in traditions such as Buddhism and philosophers such as David Hume, who famously looked inside his mind and found no “there” there, just “a bundle or collection of different perceptions”. But Chater’s version of this view can often seem like a mere redescription of our ordinary ideas rather than a revolution in understanding. One way to understand the idea of a “belief”, for example, is not as some unchanging structure you can point to within the brain, but as a disposition to act in certain ways. So, for example, the fact that I generally cross the road when the pedestrian light is green can be explained by my having a “belief” that cars will stop when their light is red. Chater doesn’t actually argue that we don’t have such dispositions, and it would be silly to try.
Quite late on, he admits that the brain does not just invent everything on the spur of the moment but operates as a “tradition”, taking into account its own past perceptions and decisions. In this view, the mind is analogous to the accretive evolution of the common law. The “tradition” does constitute, he admits, some kind of “inner mental landscape”. But if the mind makes a decision today based on its past perceptions and decisions, it’s difficult to understand why it is simultaneously so wrong to say that the mind makes a decision on the basis of a “belief” about the past. It must, after all, be making inferences from those past perceptions and decisions in order to allow them to inform its present deliberation, and what is a settled inference if not a belief?
A large missing ingredient in this book’s picture of the mind as a kind of free-jazzing blank slate, meanwhile, is the fact that evidence suggests there is substantial genetic influence on an individual’s personality traits (such as extraversion and agreeableness) and predisposition to develop mental illness. This would imply at the very least that Chater’s “improvising mind” is never starting from scratch, but is always operating within certain constraints. Chater argues that the self-fashioning brain can become whatever it wants to be – so in his view, the “tradition” is not binding. Up to a point, this is probably right, being also the basis of cognitive behavioural therapy and its ancient inspiration, stoic philosophy. But the idea that you can change yourself does seem to imply, inevitably, that there was a self to change in the first place. The mind might not be as deep as we fancy, but it can’t be two‑dimensional either.
The Mind Is Flat is published by Allen Lane. To order a copy for £21.25 (RRP £25) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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