Reading The Mind is Flat is like watching The Truman Show and realising, while you’re watching it, that you are Truman. For anyone who hasn’t seen the movie, this is Peter Weir’s 1998 fable in which Jim Carrey discovers he is unwittingly the star of the most successful reality-TV show on the planet. His world is a film set and everything that happens to him has been plotted by a brilliant if somewhat pretentious director named Christof.
Truman has this thunderbolt moment. It’s part Aristotelian anagnorisis, which is to say the realisation of something horrific, and part Camusian absurdity. But at the same time, it’s incredibly liberating. He sees that he can do whatever he wants.
If you buy into Nick Chater’s adventure in neuropsychology, you’ll experience all these things and more. Because you’ll realise that you’re not only Truman. You’re Christof too. Or, to be precise, your mind is Christof and the way you experience the world is Truman. To be more precise, although your mind is like a director, plotting as you go, it might not be a pretentious one. It might be a sitcom director or kitchen sink specialist. But one thing’s for sure: it’s brilliant.
It must be, because it’s had you fooled for so long. It’s had you thinking that you have a pretty clear vision of the way things are, when in fact your vision is anything but clear. That’s also literally true, as Chater demonstrates in his chapters on the workings of the human eye. Because it turns out that what we actually see at any given moment is only a small area of focus. And then we ‘Photoshop in’ the background in rushed and blurry brushstrokes.
I’ll give you a mundane example.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in