The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity Review

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The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity ReviewThis 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.The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity OverviewAll 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.

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