Description

All normal human beings alive in the last fifty thousand years appear to have possessed, in Mark Turner's phrase, "irrepressibly artful minds." Cognitively modern minds produced a staggering list of behavioral singularities--science, religion, mathematics, language, advanced tool use, decorative dress, dance, culture, art--that seems to indicate a mysterious and unexplained discontinuity between us and all other living things. This brute fact gives rise to some tantalizing questions: How did the artful mind emerge? What are the basic mental operations that make art possible for us now, and how do they operate?

These are the questions that occupy the distinguished contributors to this volume, which emerged from a year-long Getty-funded research project hosted by the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. These scholars bring to bear a range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives on the relationship between art (broadly conceived), the mind, and the brain. Together they hope to provide directions for a new field of research that can play a significant role in answering the great riddle of human singularity.

Reviews

"Based on a yearlong research project investigating the artful mind, hosted by Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, this volume presents some of the latest and most original thinking on the nature of the coevolution of culture and cognition and how humans acquired cognitively modern minds."--CHOICE

"The Artful Mind ...is full of provocative ideas that suggest avenues for future research.... The book is a great read, and a "must have" for those interested in creativity, or anyone who has ever wondered what is going on in the mind of the artist or the beholder of an artistic work."--Liane Gabora, Philosophical Psychology

Product Details

336 pages; 51 halftones/music examples; 6-1/8 x 9-1/4; ISBN13: 978-0-19-530636-1ISBN10: 0-19-530636-8

About the Author(s)