Episode 88: Nick Chater
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The Mind is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and The Improvised Mind
When asked about what superpower they could have if possible, people often respond with mind reading. As humans, many of us are constantly thinking about what other people are thinking about us. Does their brain work the same way as mine? What's going on in their inner world? Well, what if I told you there is actually no inner world of thought?
That is the basis of Nick Chater’s work. We all like to think we have a hidden inner life. Psychologists and psychiatrists have struggled to discover what lies below our mental surface. And Nick wants to flip that idea on its head.
Nick Chater is author of The Mind is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and The Improvised Mind, as well as a Professor of Behavioral Science at Warwick Business School.
Greg and Nick tackle a number of theories of the inner brain, including maintaining consistencies between the external and internal worlds, parallel vs serial processing, taking a break to refresh in creative pursuits, and sleeping on a big decision.
Episode Quotes:
Maintaining consistencies:
“The external world is consistent. And the illusion we have is, well, the inner world, it's a world after all, it must be consistent too. It's not. So then the intuition we have is that any inconsistencies I come up with must be some kind of reading error. I'm looking in my mind, I'm making a few mistakes. And that, of course, that's the way psychologists have normally seen it.”
Life as improv:
“I have some guidelines. I have some expectations about how I'm gonna behave and how I'm gonna feel, but I don't really know. And going back to the point that we're improvisers, it's kind of impossible to know cause I'm inventing it now. So I hadn't made it up before. And so to know what I was going to do would be to sort of do all the thinking of one's entire life and do it upfront.”
On the myth of productive multitasking:
“If you're trying to pay close attention to a particular process or a particular way things are done. And that may be, in some cases, really important, but if you're doing that, you're going to miss stuff.
And if you're trying not to miss other stuff, that might be unexpected, you're going to miss some of the meticulous stuff. There's just an inevitable trade off. You can't do both perfectly. And that's fine. What's miraculous about the human mind is it's so unbelievably good at coping with the complex world, even with these limitations.”
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Guest's Profile:
Faculty Profile at Warwick Business School
Professional Profile at The British Academy
Nick Chater on Talk at Google
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