Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture [Hardcover]

Lisa Zunshine (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 16, 2012

We live in other people's heads: avidly, reluctantly, consciously, unaware, mistakenly, and inescapably. Our social life is a constant negotiation among what we think we know about each other's thoughts and feelings, what we want each other to think we know, and what we would dearly love to know but don't.

Cognitive scientists have a special term for the evolved cognitive adaptation that makes us attribute mental states to other people through observation of their body language; they call it theory of mind. Getting Inside Your Head uses research in theory of mind to look at movies, musicals, novels, classic Chinese opera, stand-up comedy, mock-documentaries, photography, and reality television. It follows Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Darcy as he tries to conceal his anger, Tyler Durden as he lectures a stranger at gunpoint in Fight Club, and Ingrid Bergman as she fakes interest in horse races in Notorious.

This engaging book exemplifies the new interdisciplinary field of cognitive cultural studies, demonstrating that collaboration between cognitive science and cultural studies is both exciting and productive.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Zunshine’s book was difficult to stop reading; while she handles all these genres with skill, clearly her strength is in reading literature (as she returns to literary references even in the other chapters). Having an understanding of human evolution and how the brain works makes reading a book such as Zunshine’s more satisfying.

(Gregory F. Tague ASEBL Journal 2013)

Offers readers a good deal of food for thought and exemplifies how illuminating the principles from science can be when applied to other forms of culture. Highly recommended.

(Choice 2013)

Drawing widely and judiciously on recent research in neuroscience, Getting Inside Your Head expands [theory of mind] to cover all of human culture, from novels to films, plays, musicals, paintings and reality shows.

(Michael Berube American Scientist 2013)

Review

This is the cutting edge of literary scholarship... Presents a rich array of innovative approaches to textual analysis for the researcher wishing to explore the cognitive revolution.

(Cognitive Cultural Studies Review )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press (July 16, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1421406160
• ISBN-13: 978-1421406169
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.8 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #244,474 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Lisa Zunshine is a Bush-Holbrook professor of English at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, and the recipient of a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author and editor of nine books, including Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England (2005), Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (2006), Philanthropy and Fiction, 1698-1818 (2006), Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative (2008), Acting Theory and the English Stage, 1700-1830 (2009), Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (2010), and Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us About Popular Culture (2012).

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Something For Everyone January 20, 2013

By Josh Levine

Format:Hardcover

This book is fun to read, but it's very unusual; I can't quite compare it with anything else I've read in cogsci or film studies. I think the cover is misleading because it makes you think that it's about fMRI brain studies, and it's not. Zunshine takes the idea of "theory of mind," which comes from cognitive science, and she uses that idea to introduce a whole different way of thinking about popular culture. She succeeds, at least with me, because after finishing her book, I now see the "culture of greedy mindreaders" all around me. I also liked that there is something for everyone in this book. I am not a huge Jane Austen fan, but I love Andy Kaufman, Fight Club, and The Office. Finally, I thought what she said about poker faces in movies (and about Obama's "poker face" during the bin Laden raid) was really interesting. I wonder if her meme of "culture of greedy mindreaders" will catch on.

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Rambling and not worth the time or money January 1, 2013

By sherwood

Format:Hardcover

I read a lot. I also read a fair amount about cognitive science. I felt misled by the title. I recall attending my first social science course after high school - a course which largely consisted of classifying concepts that were common knowledge, rather than uncovering or synthesizing useful new knowledge. Getting Inside Your Head appears devoid of much other than 177 pages explaining "embodied transparency", a term about metacognition the author apparently coined and also fashioned into a separate book about fiction. This book appears to be an attempt to get maximum publishing mileage out of a single idea. I learned nothing useful from this work. Her previous book about fiction is referenced frequently enough that the reader is left wondering why she did not just update the previous work
I thought the writing style was rambling and self-indulgent. The author presumes that readers share her fascination with details about how this one concept is revealed throughout culture.
I dislike writing negative reviews, but I'm doing so here to spare others my unhappy experience, which resulted mostly from my own expectations and a poorly chosen book title. This book has little about the meaty field of cognitive science that I know. It is a mixture of sociology and psychology. If you are looking to sit in on a rambling chat about metacognition in culture, this would be a great read, but if you are looking for the real meat of the seemingly boundless info coming our way from cognitive science, you won't find it here.