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.
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