For millennia, we have assumed that self-knowledge begins with looking inward. But psychologist Nick Chater argues that this is impossible: the mind does not store beliefs and desires to be uncovered, it invents them on the spot. The brain is a brilliant improviser, coming up with explanations for our behaviour the instant we are asked for them. Shattering this illusion of inner depth exposes the therapeutic search for a "true self" as a futile pursuit, renders billion-dollar consumer surveys useless, and reveals that our demand for perfectly transparent AI is deeply misguided. The task of being human is not self-discovery, Chater suggests, but the creative act of self-authorship.
For millennia, people have tried not merely to look outward at the external world, but to turn inward and examine the workings of their own minds—as if there were an inner eye that could observe our mental life.
Yet a synthesis of decades of research in psychology and neuroscience shows that the very idea of introspection is an illusion. And for a surprising reason. It is not merely that we find it difficult to accurately perceive our inner motives, beliefs, principles, and desires (or that these are repressed, as Freud suggested). The problem is more fundamental: there are no such stable beliefs and desires “inside” us that can be observed and reported. Instead, the human mind is a wonderfully fluent, but profoundly deceptive, improviser: spinning stories justifying our thoughts and actions as fast as we ask questions. And these invented explanations are vague, inconsistent, and often provably wrong.
Consider, for example, the wonderfully clever experiments by Petter Johansson and Lars Hall and their colleagues at Lund University in Sweden. They gave people pairs of faces presented on cards and asked them to select their preferred face. They then handed people the card with their chosen face and asked them to explain their preference. On a small number of trials, however, by using close-up card magic, they tricked people by handing them the wrong card—the face they had not chosen.
In the great majority of cases, not only do people fail to notice the switch, but they happily and fluently justify the choice they didn’t actually make; and they do so just as confidently as for the choices they did make. If justifications came from introspection—looking inside our minds to discern the “true” explanation for our preferences, they would of course treat the two cases very differently—because when the cards were switched, the justification would make no sense. Yet not only do people not notice—they often explain their (apparent) choice with comments like “it’s those nice earrings” when the face they originally chose wasn’t even wearing earrings. The justifications must be mere rationalizations—improvisations fabricated in the moment they are asked for—rather than the product of genuine introspection.
Let’s extend that thought a little further. For most people, the areas of the brain concerned with language are primarily concentrated in the left hemisphere. Suppose, then, it were possible to give people a task that could only be carried out by the right hemisphere (without “telling” the left hemisphere what it was doing). In that case, the left hemisphere would have no way, in principle, of knowing—or introspecting—the true origin of the behaviour. But if our explanations of our own minds are no more than fluent fabrications, the left hemisphere should still be able to come up with some (wrong, but plausible) explanation for the right hemisphere’s choice.
13th May 2026
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Mark Connely 15 May 2026
Introspection may be an illusion. But if so, then, like much of our experience, it is a necessary illusion, one we have evolved to perceive. There are stable beliefs and attitudes which inform our personalities and from which we habitually act. We have access in our minds to factual information about our thoughts and behaviors, which we are able to examine and question. It's not all confabulation.
Lisa Friedlander 13 May 2026
I enjoyed this article but I am not sure this PROVES that there are no inner preferences. Because in the face with earrings, earrings may indeed be preferred over no earrings, but in the initial choice of face there may have been another feature, say the eyes or hair or expression which seemed more appealing than in the face they initially did not choose. By having any preference at all there sits the implication that it has been previously established and thus drawn upon in some "inward" way. I don't think the Gazzaniga study helps the case either because the story of the right brain when it saw a snow scene, connected the shovel, but in consideration of the other picture, the left brain’s language center applied in a deductive fashion the reason a shovel made sense in relationship to the chicken picture. You have simply created two different experiences in succession. It does not prove that there isn’t a substrate knowledge that shovels work to shovel out something—snow or chicken shit. You'd have to create a scenario where no previoulsly accessed relationship had ever been experienced. What I love about this article is praise for the imaginative ways in which we rationalize and relate different items, however in all the above cases there are implications of sense-making relationships that had to jhave existed prior to the experiments and are therefore accessed inwardly, to use that metaphor in order to provide a sensible answer.
Michael McDowell 1 14 May 2026
Nick Chater is not arguing that we don’t have beliefs or inner preferences, but that they do not exist as mental states. They are linguistic confabulations that we used to describe our behaviours.
This is exactly how Wittgenstein describes language about inner states.
It also consistent with Zen Buddhist teachings about all form (including language) being empty.
Actually, thinking about this, if you’re interested in the Buddhist concept of no-self Nick Chater’s book The Mind is Flat is a very good place to start if you are of a more scientific bent.
Brian Balke 13 May 2026
I have to dig a little deeper here.
I thought that the psychology community learned last century how dangerous it is to the subject to participate in studies designed to test the degree to which pathological behavior will manifest.
As the author seems not to be a therapist, I will advise that as a therapist, I am convicted by every experience with a client that the construction of a coherent model of identity is a central feature of our neurophysiology. The mind needs to be confident that it is working in a unified way to secure safety and fulfilment.
Taking this as given, the experiment with the two images confronts the subject with evidence that demolishes that confidence. This can be inferred by the need to develop a rationalization for the contradictory behavior that restores the sense of coherence. The acute trauma leads to an appeal to the experimental authority that, indeed, there is a connection between the two parts of the mind.
I am appalled that this experiment was allowed under existing ethical guidelines. I am even further appalled that the results are used to substantiate the claim that human intellect is analogous to the operations of the large-language models produced by this artificial intelligence community.
And this leads something that makes me truly angry. For there is a colorable assertion that this is actually the goal of this paper: to convince people that AGI engines as currently implemented supply all the features of human intellect. Substitution of an AGI engine for a human decision-maker is therefore a rational choice.
After all, we don't really have a social identity that needs to participate in maintaining a social contract, do we?
Brian Balke 13 May 2026
Whenever exposed to the grand philosophical musings of psychiatrists, I wonder whether they realize the contradictions between their studies and their conclusions. Clearly, the ability of the brain to synthesize explanations depends upon some context. The ability of the experimenter to rationalize concerning the behavior of subjects, in fact, depends upon that assumption. The two hemispheres are working with different context. If the subject's explanation for the snow shovel was completely random ("Oh, I find the sound of 's' more sympathetic in my ears than the hard 'k' of "claw"), then we might be justified in subscribing to the musings offered here.
I agree with the fact that introspection for the goal of understanding perception is futile. Those stimuli are the ground truth of our experience, and to question them puts us on a short road to psychological paralysis. However, in the process of "self-authorship" encouraged by the author, we are concerned with character. The description of character is grounded, as Wittgenstein emphasized, in social conventions. As Buddha encouraged, we have the capacity to modify our character through emulation of exemplars in real life and literature. That work requires introspection. "Why was I so harsh to my subordinate? How would I respond if treated in that way?"
Michael McDowell 1 14 May 2026
My friend, you have seriously misunderstood Wittgenstein‘s understanding of the language describing interstates.
For Wittgenstein language, referring to subjective states are based on social conventions that sublimate innate behavioral responses and do not describe the interstates. Go read the Beetle in a Box thought experiment.
You’ve also misunderstood the Buddhist teachings that have specific relevance to this article namely change and no-self. Ones conception of oneself is both impermanent and illusory. It is being constantly fabricated. The objective insight is to realize this fact.