Tag Archives: psychology

Book review

The Mind is Flat, by Nick Chater, 2018

The Mind is Flat, by Nick Chater, 2018

“almost everything we think we know about our own mind is a hoax, played on us by our own brains.”

The Mind is Flat is one of those disturbing books that makes you change the way you look at the world. It certainly did for me anyway. Whether that change will be permanent, or whether I will relapse into the comforting delusion of an inner life, remains to be seen.

This book asks the question you probably haven’t even asked yourself – do we as humans have a different level of consciousness from animals? (Chater doesn’t phrase it this way or even consider animals as an alternative to human consciousness, but the parallel works for me.) If you watch animals they live in the moment, responding to their environment and their needs and instincts, almost nothing more. If they want to kill something, they kill it – no hesitation or equivocation. (There might be hesitation about the best way to execute the hunt, but that’s just practicality not more ambivalence). We think of ourselves as existing on a higher plane – we have an inner life of values, thoughts, experience and principles, and respond to our world very differently. But do we? Chater’s thesis – and I have no idea to what extent this is original work or something that has been around for centuries – is that we construct our perception of the world as we go along. We have no beliefs, desires, fears, personality, or “inner life”. The brain makes everything up responding to the world as we experience it through our deeply flawed senses.

Chater focuses on sight in this book although I suspect similar analysis could be applied to our other senses, and shows how unreliable sight can be – how partial our view of the world is, how little we actually see, and how much the brain sketches in the rest of the field of vision. There are some fascinating studies referenced here (some of which quite obviously were intended for a colour version of the book, and which don’t work as well in the black and white paperback version). One is the Ninio experiment where the black dots on this image drop in and out of our sight as our eyes move across the screen or page. We can only see one or two of these at a time, even though our brain is telling us we can see the rest of the image – in reality we can’t, we are just better at filling in the grid than we are the dots. (People reading this will say “I can see all the dots”. They can’t – what is happening is that their eyes are making those micro-adjustments we make all the time but are barely aware of. 

Ninio, J. and Stevens, K. A. (2000) Variations on the Hermann grid: an extinction illusion. Perception, 29, 1209-1217

It might seem a big leap from ‘our eyes can play tricks on us’ to ‘consciousness is an illusion’, but Chater draws the lines between the two carefully and convincingly.

“The brain is such a compelling storyteller that we are fooled into thinking that it is not creating our thoughts ‘in the moment’ but fishing them from some deep inner sea of pre-formed colours, objects, memories, beliefs or preferences, of which our conscious thoughts are merely the shimmering surface. But that world is a… fiction created in the moment by our own brain. There are no pre-formed beliefs, desire, preferences, attitudes, even memories, hidden in the deep recesses of the mind. Indeed the mind has no deep recesses in which anything can hide. The mind is flat: the surface is all there is.”

This is all so profoundly counter-intuitive that the normal response is denial. ‘Your mind may be flat but mine is fully-rounded, with values, intelligence, principles and a whole lot of other stuff going on, most of which is going on in the background while I eat, sleep, walk etc’. Perhaps, but the case for this being just a story we tell ourselves to explain the world as we experience it is compelling.

Looking at the counter-argument for a bit, first we aren’t animals. We don’t just kill people when angry (not all of us anyway), steal when we want something, sleep with anyone at any time. But of course some people do. And perhaps the reason we don’t all respond that way is not because of some internal policeman, but because we have better memories than animals – we know that there are consequences from killing, stealing etc. If these consequences weren’t there, would we be so restrained? This is why we need laws, police, courts etc in the first place. Perhaps this also explains why a civilised society like Germany in the 1930’s could inflict the holocaust on the Jewish people (and the other minority groups involved) – remove the consequences and we will do pretty much anything, however barbaric and inhuman.

This theory also explains the feeling that many people have of being dead inside, meat robots, acting a part and waiting for their lives to start. We watch other people having their complex lives, their relationships and romances, adventures and achievements, and assume they are whole people rather than just acting out their parts in some bizarre version of the Truman Show.

If this is all feeling far too depressing, here’s some consolation, I hope. Firstly, we aren’t just responding to our environment moment by moment. We have instincts that dictate how we respond without even engaging our thoughts. Some of these instincts are primeval and we lose them as we grow older. Then there are the aspects of our behaviour and personality that are determined by our genes (which explains how twins separated at birth often develop along closely aligned pathways, unless of course that is an urban myth!). We still get to make choices about what we do, it’s just those are choices we make, not the person living secretly inside us. Once you accept that the mind is flat, that we don’t have a subconscious to which we can ascribe anything negative or unpleasant in our personalities, that is in a way liberating.

There are some pathways Chater could have gone down in this book, some avenues of exploration, which I wish he had. Firstly, how do people who are blind from birth and perhaps have restrictions in their other senses experience the world? How do they make things up moment to moment? Second, if we have no secret inner identity what are the implications for gender and sexuality? Perhaps even more significantly what does this mean for the study and practice of psychiatry, and even for religion – the idea that people have souls? These are deep waters I accept, and the author only had so many pages to play with, but it would have been interesting to read a discussion of these issues.

This was a challenging book that I would recommend to anyone who is interested in the mind – which is everyone surely? It may not be a comfortable read, and there were many moments where I had to stop and retrace my steps to ensure I had got what the author was trying to say (and I am not sure I succeeded at each point), but in the end it gave me a lot to think about, and some insights into many issues that I hadn’t even considered were issues before. I’d love to know what others thought about it (or think they think about it!)

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Book review, Non-fiction, popular science, psychology, Tali Sharot

The Influential Mind, What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others, by Tali Sharot, 2017

As a break from the recent relentless Pratchettery I have managed to finish this book of popular science written by Tali Sharot, a neuroscientist who also wrote ‘The Optimism Bias’. This is timely because the paperback version comes out on 2 August in the UK, and I suspect you will see piles of this book in your local bookstores.

The author is a serious scientist: she is a Ted talker, director of the Affective Brain Lab at University College London and a Wellcome Trust Fellow and has been published on various topics including the neuroscience of optimism, emotional memories and cognitive dissonance in journals such as Nature. In other words this is more than just one of those light hearted copy and paste books on science that tell you little more than you will find on Wikipedia – this is a review of the literature and science of influence, albeit presented in an accessible fashion. Why influence? Well it’s key to understanding why people behave the way they do, and surely this world needs a bit more understanding and empathy at the moment.

‘The Influential Mind will make you gasp with surprise – and laugh with recognition. Many of our most cherished beliefs about how to influence others turn out to be wrong; Sharot sets them right. Packed with practical insights, this profound book will change your life. An instant classic’ Cass R. Sunstein, bestselling co-author of Nudge

 

No it won’t, no they aren’t, and no it isn’t.

It is understandable that the publishers chose this review to illustrate this book’s entry on their website and adorn the hardback edition’s front page. This is a classic case of log-rolling – two minutes on Google told me that Sunstein has co-authored papers with Sharot – but it is also an extreme example of hyperbole. The only way this book would change your life is if you tripped over it at the top of a stairwell. I have no recollection whatsoever of gasping as I read it – maybe the occasional slow nod of recognition at a point well made – and there are few if any laughs in here either. This is a serious book, and it really does it no favours to pretend it is life-changing or ground breaking – it is no more nor less than a thoughtful review of the existing research into this subject, presented in an accessible fashion. Popular science in other words, perhaps not at its finest but no worse than the rest of what is becoming a crowded field.

The most striking example the author cites when discussing the importance of understanding how influence works relates to the vexed topic of hand washing in hospitals. A study of how frequently doctors and nurses in US hospitals wash their hands found shocking failure rates, leading directly to infections. Monitoring the staff remotely via video had no impact – as long as they knew they weren’t going to face any punishment they simply did not change their behaviour. What had a dramatic impact however was publishing hand washing rates in real time on a screen in the staff restroom. Rates shot up. Sharot speculates that this was because positive feedback on performance was perceived by staff as a non-pecuniary reward. In other words, rewarding people can influence their behaviour. Who knew? So far as I know there were no similar punishment trials where people had a % of their salary deducted each time they failed to wash their hands, but I guess it would have had the same results.

 

Elsewhere this book hits more topical and predictable targets. Trump and his power to persuade based on emotion rather than logic, the anti-vaccine movement and how to counter it (don’t try to address the lies in the anti-vaxx case, just emphasise the positives of vaccination i.e. the avoidance of death) and the times when the wisdom of crowds can be misleading. This is all packaged in an engaging and relatively short book which you will find interesting if you are looking for an introduction to this topic.

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Book review

Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson

When I use the term “challenging” to describe a book, this is usually a euphemism for “hard to read” – either because it is badly written, or just long-winded. ‘Moby Dick’ is a challenging novel, for example. So are ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Middlemarch’, and any other number of Victorian blockbusters (I know Ulysses isn’t Victorian!)  But I found ‘Mistakes Were Made’ challenging in a very different way – it challenged some of my deeply held beliefs. Which was unusual and very refreshing. I didn’t agree with everything the authors wrote or argued, but being shown a different perspective has to be a good thing.

‘Mistakes were made, but not by me’ is a book of popular (i.e accessible, rather than academic or textbook) psychology, exploring the concept of cognitive dissonance, the mental discomfort (psychological stress) experienced by us all when we simultaneously hold contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values. Cognitive dissonance is a consequence of a person performing an action that contradicts personal beliefs, ideals, and values; and also occurs when confronted with new information that contradicts said beliefs, ideals, and values. So for example you believe the NHS I being under-funded, but when you look the statistics up you find that investment is going up above the rate of inflation. Instead of saying, how interesting, you tart to look for other statistics that will undermine this, and tell you what you really want to hear – that relative to other countries funding is down for example. This is an entirely natural response. When we experience CD we all have the impulse to minimise the uncomfortable feeling by refusing to accept the new information (“fake news”). On social media we are much more likely to be believe (and retweet or share) a post that endorses our ideas than one that challenges them. This is the reason for the so-called echo chamber phenomenon.

The authors go on to examine how cognitive dissonance causes mistakes to be made – we find it hard to accept our initial thoughts or conclusions are wrong, and seek out any number of ways to defend ourselves against the discomfort this causes, to the extent of denying or ignoring hard facts against us.

While this is a very accessible, readable account, the 40 pages of footnotes are clear evidence that this is also well-researched. Most of the examples are drawn from the United States, but that’s fine – the authors are American and write about the area they know best.

So why did I find it challenging? At the heart of the issue is the compelling section of the book about repressed memory. This really got me thinking, and reading other sources. I had accepted for a long time, without really thinking about it very much, that the repressed memory was a real thing. It’s a Freudian concept, and there is evidence (not discussed here) that the idea was not previously thought of before Freud. The authors make the familiar point that for most trauma, the challenge is forgetting the pain and distress, rather than remembering it. They also highlight research that shows how easy it is to implant false memories of childhood trauma – the so-called ‘Lost in the Mall’ experiment, where adults were easily persuaded that they had a childhood experience if being lost in a shopping centre, when they hadn’t.

So why am I still resisting the idea that repressed memory doesn’t exist? I think there are three main reasons: first, it sounds plausible. That’s obviously a cognitive dissonance coping strategy – ignore the evidence, and rather than presenting counter evidence just say that your original ideas are valid because they just are. Second, I think I have read about examples of repressed memory – but have I? Or were these fictional representations, in films or books? I have a sneaking suspicion they might have been. Lastly, while the concept of repressed memory is less widely supported than twenty years ago or so, the fact remains that large numbers of psychiatrists and psychologists still accept the concept. So I think the jury is still out, but the authors don’t have any doubts. They don’t hedge their position by referring to the evidence that suppressed memories exist – they would argue there is none. There’s obviously a baby/bathwater risk here – if all recovered repressed memories of childhood trauma or abuse are implanted or otherwise false, there is a risk that people take the wrong next step of concluding that all memories of such abuse are equally open to question or challenge? These are deep waters, and I still don’t know what I think about them – I certainly haven’t accepted the authors’ position unsceptically – but I am sure you can see why I found the book so thought-provoking.

If you are interested in how memory works, enjoy having your preconceptions challenged, and don’t mind revisiting some familiar psychological experiments, then ‘Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)’ is recommended. We can all benefit from acknowledging that we are as vulnerable to mis-remembering or making mistakes – we alone are unlikely to be infallible, while all around are prone to error – and that challenging our preconceptions (“I think I can remember that, but I might be wrong”) is a healthy reflex.

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