An astonishing achievement. Nick Chater has blown my mind - as well as assuring me that my brain just doesn't work the way I think it does. I haven't been able to stop talking about the ideas in this book

A superb exposition of scientific findings

It's a triumph in itself that Chater has written a book about cognition that is as gripping as a thriller. In fact, I would go even further. If you can measure a book by how often you find yourself bringing it up in conversation, then The Mind is Flat is one of the best I've ever read . . .

Brilliant . . . beautifully written . . . you'll be able to bored your relatives rigid with your new theories of cognition over the Christmas turkey

This is a remarkable book. Every other book about the mind will tell you either why we're so dumb, or why we're so smart. Chater offers a single elegant theory to explain both: why our minds so often let us down and confound us, at the same time that they far surpass our current attempts to build intelligence in machines

The mind may be flat but this book is a fascinating, rounded and radical approach to understanding how we think and act. The implications for understanding human decision making are profound. Everyone who enjoyed Thinking, Fast and Slow must read this book

A total assault on all lingering psychiatric and psychoanalytic notions of mental depths to be plumbed. For Chater, surface is everything ... Light the touchpaper and stand well back

Launched with what may be the most engaging prologue of any work of nonfiction, the reader of The Mind is Flat is taken on a fascinating intellectual journey. Chater first compels us to leave behind widely-accepted views about the depth of the mind, abandoning the cherished idea that thinking is rooted in the depths of unconscious thought. But far from depriving the life of the mind of its charm, magic or meaning, Chater introduces us to a new appreciation of the brain's remarkable propensity and capacity to make sense of experience. While the mind may indeed be flat in the sense it is devoid of unconscious ruminations, reading this book leaves us with a much deeper, transformed, understanding of our own thoughts and feelings and of how we perceive the definitively non-flat world in which we live

Relatable, moving, and fantastically funny.

Hilarious, unexpected and ultimately life-affirming.

Beautifully written and so funny! I related to it A LOT.

You WILL laugh and laugh while reading this.

I loved it! It's such a wonderful title, and the book lives up to it.

An intimate, rigorously researched, collectio

In a voice both laboratorial and poetic, Wang examines her own diagnosis, as well as her PTSD and Lyme disease, with a gentleness and frankness that mesmerizes and demystifies

Wang is a brilliant writer. . . . This intimate essay collection grapples with her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder and all the sorrow and searching that comes with it. Always artful and illuminating, never facile

Wang's clear-eyed look into a complicated reality makes this is an essential read for anyone who better wants to understand why we treat each other--and ourselves--so harshly at any display of weakness; it's a book of compassion and brilliance, an unflinching look at a topic that has long repelled too many of us.

Esmé Weijun Wang's compelling essays highlight the humanity behind a schizophrenia diagnosis, delivering a necessary read tackling mental illness

Wang creates an unforgettable portrait of a singular brain

Wang is a highly articulate and graceful essayist, and her insights, in both the clinical and general senses, are exceptional.

Wang writes brilliantly and beautifully about lives lived with mental illness

In writing about her experiences, Wang puts a face to the silent suffering of millions of people. Her searing honesty coupled with the strength of her writing make The Collected Schizophrenias a remarkable look into a little-understood part of the human condition

An illuminating, breathtaking look into the underexplored world of schizophrenia, with the rare perspective of someone who's actually been there

Wang . . . eloquently balances personal narrative and empirical research to offer a powerful series of insights into a woefully misunderstood world.

This beautifully written work will expand your thinking about severe mental illness and mental illness in general

The Collected Schizophrenias is illumination and important--not only because it educates and challenges--but because it forces us to consider how much we still have to work to undo historical and systematic damage, to challenge our own broken, misguided partiality towards what it means to be healthy and sane

[The Collected Schizophrenias] organizes the confusion, terror and complexity of [Wang's] experience into an imperfectly cohesive, profoundly illuminating whole.

Penetrating and revelatory.

This mesmerizing collection of essays has achieved the rarest of rarities--a meaningful and expansive language for a subject that has been long bound by both deep revulsion and intense fascination

A brilliant guide to the complexities of thinking about illness, and mental illness, in particular. It will bring hope to others searching to understand their own diagnoses

A masterful braiding of the achingly personal and the incisively researched. . . . This book is a vital, illuminating window onto the world we all already live in, but find all too easy to ignore

You won't find any pity-baiting, sensationalism, or false positivity here; Wang is so candidly aware that I'd trust her over my own diary

Esmé Weijun Wang offers us an all-access pass to her beautiful, unquiet mind. . . Rarely has a book about living with mental illness felt so immediate, raw, and powerful

The Collected Schizophrenias is at once generous and brilliantly nuanced, rigorous and bold. It had me rethinking what it is to be well or ill.

Esmé Weijun Wang sends out revelatory dispatches from an under-mapped land, shot like arrows in all directions from a taut bow of a mind. . . . Her work changes the way we think about illness - which is to say that it changes us