The mind is flat
by Nick Chater · first published 2018
50% recommend50% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Argues that our sense of a rich, deep inner mind is largely an illusion, with the brain building a full picture from sparse internal representations. A good pick for anyone curious about how cognition works.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
"Psychologists and neuroscientists struggle with how best to interpret human motivation and decision making. The assumption is that below a mental "surface" of conscious awareness lies a deep and complex set of inner beliefs, values, and desires that govern our thoughts, ideas, and actions, and that to know this depth is to know ourselves. In this profoundly original book, behavioral scientist Nick Chater contends just the opposite: rather than being the plaything of unconscious currents, the brain generates behaviors in the moment based entirely on our past experiences. Engaging the reader wi
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This view is quite similar to the theory outlined in "The Mind Is Flat" book: https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Flat-Remarkable-Shallowness-Impr... which I can greatly recommend.
on “There Is No Such Thing as Conscious Thought” ↗…to this one is, you don't necessarily need to because a lot of intuitions we have about the nature of our own minds just kind of suck. Nick Chater wrote an interesting book a few years ago called The Mind is Flat in which he made the case that a lot of deep perceptions about ourselves are wrong. We literally just make most of it up as we go along. He went through lots of examples but one is this kind of thing[1].…
on “What You (Want to)* Want” ↗The Mind is Flat by Nick Chater (so hard to pick just one, and I may be affected by recency bias, but that's my finalist right now)
on “Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read?” ↗Already plugged this book elsewhere in the thread, you might be interested in "The Mind is Flat". One chapter of the book explores the concept you're describing. Our brain creates the illusion of a "full picture" when often our imagination and internal representation is quite sparse. I think that's…
on “Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’” ↗Read "The Mind is Flat" - your idea is a theme of the book. We already have a few examples of adversarial information for humans: optical illusions being the most widely discussed.
on “Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’” ↗Another article that refers to the book "The Mind is Flat", there was recently a submission and related discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17625244 Highly recommend reading the book, it really is mind blowing and thought provoking!
on “Our brain is a storyteller, not a reporter from an inner world” ↗I can recommend The Mind is Flat https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Flat-Illusion-Mental-Improvised-... which is more high level, but still seems compatible with this theory.
on “Jeff Hawkins Is Finally Ready to Explain His Brain Research” ↗I share your experience. But, I've recently read a book, The Mind is Flat by Nick Chater, a psychologist, wherein he argues that your brain does not crunch anything in the background, and only does what it focuses on. However, the situation you outlined still occurs because…
on “Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output” ↗…debunked. Bartels and Achen in Democracy for Realists showcase how incoherent and flimsy political decision making is, behavioral research has shown the effectiveness of nudging in policy, Nick Chater in the mind is flat drawing on lots of research casts doubt on the narrative of 'deep beliefs' and so on. The idea that we're inoculated against manipulation because we're all deeply complex people with coherent ideologies…
on “We all wear tinfoil hats now” ↗While reading the prologue of the book the mind is flat by Nick Chater published in 2018, the description is very similar to how a LLM works, that is it creates or predicts the next word without deep concepts about what is the structure of the future. Is an…
on “Ask HN: Did you relate the Mind is Flat book to LLMs?” ↗Reminds me of the book “The Mind Is Flat” by Nick Chater, discussed in this blog : https://www.jasoncollins.blog/posts/nick-chaters-the-mind-is...
on “The brain is not a computer (2016)” ↗…Basic shapes that are probably somewhat evolutionarily preserved. I wonder if we could somehow mimic those for tokenization purposes. Most likely there's someone out there already trying. (Source: "The mind is flat" by Nick Chater)
on “Gemini 3” ↗Interesting. Reminds me of the book "The Mind is Flat" by Nick Charter who says that the mind is constantly improvising.
on “Our brains create mental "chapters" with new event segmentation study” ↗