cognitive science and the riddle of human creativity /
edited by Mark Turner.
New York :
Oxford University Press,
2006.
1 online resource (xvi, 314 pages) :
illustrations, music
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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 no.