How our minds work

Most of the time, we tend to think that our thoughts, feelings, and desires well up from within. They’re lurking there is a mysterious inner, mental world, and occasionally they burst through with surges of emotion, with things that we might say and perhaps might regret; just generally driving our behaviour from this inner, mental world.

We want to suggest a perspective that is different from that.

We are complex and mysterious beings

To be sure, we’re complex and mysterious beings, and each one of us is very different from the next. Human behaviour is very mysterious and a difficult-to-understand topic, but we suspect the complexity has a rather different origin.

So rather than imagining that there’s this inner, hidden world, which we can only occasionally look inside (which occasionally bursts through and affects our behaviour), instead we want you to think about your mind as an improviser, to think that you really are creating or making up your mind as you’re going along.

Interpretation

In particular situations, you interpret that situation in a specific way, and that interpretation isn’t hidden within you. It’s not an attitude necessarily, or a belief, or a desire that was always there all along; instead, we propose that you’re creating it at the moment.

Of course, you’re not creating it at random – you’re creating it in a way that fits with other things you’ve done and with other things you’ve said, that fits with your character.

The legal system and the mind

In fact you’re a bit like the legal system. You have a great system of cases, which make the law, and every case is a new case – but nonetheless, it’s under a judge who makes the decision (and the jury too, perhaps) based on the specifics of that case. But, of course, they refer back to all those previous cases. Like the legal system you’re not making your mind up in a vacuum, you’re making up your mind to stay in character, to be the kind of person you want to be and normally are.

This is an unusual perspective.

We don’t want to take this as a dogmatic starting point. The aim is rather to get you to think in a new and fresh way about how you work and to discuss this with each other – to think about your own lives and to try and understand yourselves in a different way.

What do we mean by a ‘flat mind’?

It’s very important to point to stress, that the flatness of the mind is very different from its complexity.

In particular, an awful lot of our behaviour seems to be determined by precedent, by looking back and thinking, “well, what did I do in a situation like this when I came across it before?” or “what do other people do when they’re in situations like this?” We’re either copying ourselves or we’re copying other people, but not copying in a blind way. We’re copying often in a very clever way, very elaborately thinking through “well, if I did that then I suppose this situation is a bit like it, so if they’re analogous, I should do this in this situation”.

So it’s a bit like case law; the legal cases are decided in many aspects of the law by looking back at past cases. There aren’t actually any sort of written laws to refer to, but that doesn’t mean that case law is all over the place, and it doesn’t mean it’s simple. It is incredibly complicated because there are many different precedents to refer to.

We, therefore, want you to not fear that you’re under attack, as it were, as complex, sophisticated human beings. In fact, your own history as a person and the people that you interact with and the experiences you have make you who you are.

If you’d like to learn more about the ‘flat mind’, check out the full online course from The University of Warwick, below.