The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity [Hardcover]

Mark Turner (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 26, 2006

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"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

About the Author

Mark Turner is at Case Western Reserve University.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1 edition (October 26, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195306368
• ISBN-13: 978-0195306361
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,285,291 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A huge disappointment, February 15, 2008

By 

Chris Crawford (Oregon USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity (Hardcover)

This should have been a magnificent book. It boasts contributions from fourteen eminent writers scattered across a wide range of disciplines: anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, neurobiology, music, sociology, art history, and literature. They approach the problem of artistic creativity from every different angle. This is the kind of interdisciplinary approach that often yields impressive insights.

But this book failed to grab me. I wasn't surprised that a few of the chapters sputtered out in dense verbosity; the diversity of authors and approaches guarantees that some just won't click for any given reader. My disappointment stems from the uniform failure of the material to tackle the problem. There are some stellar authors in this book, writers such as George Lakoff, Merlin Donald, and Terrence Deacon, whose other works I have enjoyed and learned much from. But in this book, their work never rises to the level of their other works.

The book comes in six parts, each comprised of several chapters:

Art and Evolution
Art and Emotion
Art and the Way We Think
Art, Meaning, and Form
Art and Sacred Belief
Art and Ambiguity

These are exciting topics, and I expected to read penetrating analyses that shed light on the unique role of art in human cognition. But instead, most of the material has a vague, tentative feel to it. The two chapters on art and evolution say almost nothing about how art appears to have developed in human cognition. At the very least, I expected a discussion of the explosion of artistic expression marked by the first cave paintings. But in fact the cave paintings attracted only a few discursive mentions in the book. Nor is there any discussion of the role of art in hunter-gatherer societies, sexual selection factors that might have affected the development of artistic thinking, or anything from evolutionary biology.

There are a few interesting discussions of the role of mirror neurons in artistic development, but the authors did not offer anything specific about the relationship between mirror neurons and artistic thinking; most of this discussion was tentative.

There was plenty of conventional analysis of art, such as a long discussion of the geometric structure behind several paintings, but this kind of discussion has been around for a long time and I found nothing of particular interest in it.

This book was the result of a year-long research project at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, which brought together these authors for an intensive collaboration. The effort should have produced an explosion of fascinating ideas. But, despite all reasonable expectations, the end result is a dud.