"Kay Young's Imagining Minds is an excellent book: insightful, timely and distinctive, well-informed, and written in a style that is clear, concise, lively, and engaging. It will be a must-read book for narrative theorists, comparable to Lisa Zunshine' Why We Read Fiction and Alan Palmer's Fictional Minds."---Alison A. Case, professor of English, Williams College --
Progress in Brain Research series, highlights new advances in the field, with this new volume presenting interesting chapters. Each chapter is written by an international board of authors. - Provides the authority and expertise of leading contributors from an international board of authors - Presents the latest release in the Progress of Brain Research series - Updated release includes the latest information on the Imagining the Brain: Episodes in the Visual History of Brain Research
The central claim of Minds in Motion is that British travel writing of the long eighteenth century functions as an epistemological playing field where authors test empiricist models of engagement with the world while simultaneously seeking out the role of the self and the imagination in producing knowledge. Whether exploring the relationship between the senses and the mind, the narrative viability of experimental detachment, or the literary dynamics of virtual witnessing, eighteenth-century travel authors persistently confront their positionality and raise difficult questions about the nature and value of first-hand experience. In one way or another, they also complicate empiricist ideals by exploring the limits of individual perception and the role of the imagination in generating and relating knowledge. While the genre is often viewed as either numbingly documentary or non-literary and commercial, travel literature actually operates at the front line of the period’s intellectual developments, illustrating both how individual writers grapple with philosophical ideals and how these ideals filter into the lives of ordinary people. Indeed, travel literature directly engages the scientific and philosophical concerns of the period, while it is also widely, avidly read; as such, it offers models for cognitive and rhetorical practices that are evaluated and either embraced or rejected by readers (in a process of identification not unlike that which occurs in early English fiction). Moreover, because eighteenth-century travel literature is so crucial to the development of so many fields—from botany to the novel—it illustrates vividly the divisive energies of discipline and genre formation while also archiving the shared aims and methods of what will become discrete fields of study. Travelogues as diverse as Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World (1666) and Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) reveal the epistemological circuitry of the eighteenth century and historicize the absorption of the philosophical tendencies that have come to define modernity.
An eminent psychologist offers a major new theory of human cognition: movement, not language, is the foundation of thought When we try to think about how we think, we can't help but think of words. Indeed, some have called language the stuff of thought. But pictures are remembered far better than words, and describing faces, scenes, and events defies words. Anytime you take a shortcut or play chess or basketball or rearrange your furniture in your mind, you've done something remarkable: abstract thinking without words. In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas. Spatial thinking even underlies the structure and meaning of language: why we say we push ideas forward or tear them apart, why we're feeling up or have grown far apart. Like Thinking, Fast and Slow before it, Mind in Motion gives us a new way to think about how--and where--thinking takes place.
Imagining Animals explores the making of animal images in art therapy and child psychotherapy. It examines two contrasting primitive states of mind: the investing of the world about us with life through animism and participation mystique, and the lifeless world of autistic states of mind encountered in children who are hard to reach. Caroline Case examines how the emergence of animal imagery in therapy can act as a powerful catalyst for children in autistic states of mind, or with a background of trauma, abuse or depression. She also looks at animal / human relationships, and animal symbolism, as well as three-dimensional claywork and the development of personality. Subjects covered include: * animals on stage in therapy - anthropomorphic animal objects * the location of self in animals * entangled and confusional children: analytical approaches to psychotic thinking and autistic features in childhood. The book concludes with a compelling extended case study, which describes analytic work with a child with multiple symptoms, using the various therapeutic tools of play and art, painting and clay, and the development of character, plot and narrative. Imagining Animals offers a unique insight into the role and representation of animal imagery in art therapy and child psychotherapy, which will be of interest to all arts and play therapists working with children as well as adult psychotherapists interested in the use of imagery.
A new edition of a classic work that originated the “embodied cognition” movement and was one of the first to link science and Buddhist practices. This classic book, first published in 1991, was one of the first to propose the “embodied cognition” approach in cognitive science. It pioneered the connections between phenomenology and science and between Buddhist practices and science—claims that have since become highly influential. Through this cross-fertilization of disparate fields of study, The Embodied Mind introduced a new form of cognitive science called “enaction,” in which both the environment and first person experience are aspects of embodiment. However, enactive embodiment is not the grasping of an independent, outside world by a brain, a mind, or a self; rather it is the bringing forth of an interdependent world in and through embodied action. Although enacted cognition lacks an absolute foundation, the book shows how that does not lead to either experiential or philosophical nihilism. Above all, the book's arguments were powered by the conviction that the sciences of mind must encompass lived human experience and the possibilities for transformation inherent in human experience. This revised edition includes substantive introductions by Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch that clarify central arguments of the work and discuss and evaluate subsequent research that has expanded on the themes of the book, including the renewed theoretical and practical interest in Buddhism and mindfulness. A preface by Jon Kabat-Zinn, the originator of the mindfulness-based stress reduction program, contextualizes the book and describes its influence on his life and work.
Nicholas Rescher surveys and analyzes the different kinds of unreal possibilities and nonexistent objects, tying together all the diverse ways in which this area has been approached by philosophers. As he surveys the field and clarifies the kinds of unreality, he also makes a sustained argument against the philosophical fashion for dealing with nonexistent possible world as though they were authentic objects. The author holds that, while we may discuss possibilities, we ought not to accord them ontological status. The possibility of existence of a certain sort of world is not the existence of possible world of a certain sort. While we may reasonable discuss possibilities at the generic level, such as a world where dogs have horns, this does not require a commitment to a possible world where they do. The work that theorists of logic and language want to accomplish with possible worlds and individuals can be managed with propositional manifolds, stories or scenarios, while the modalities of necessity and possibility that modal logicians want to analyze in terms of realization in possible worlds can be handled by turning instead to figuring in stories or scenarios.
If you want to be as successful as Jack Welch, Larry Bossidy, or Michael Dell, read their autobiographical advice books, right? Wrong, says Roger Martin in The Opposable Mind. Though following best practice can help in some ways, it also poses a danger. By emulating what a great leader did in a particular situation, you'll likely be terribly disappointed with your own results. Why? Your situation is different. Instead of focusing on what exceptional leaders do, we need to understand and emulate how they think. Successful businesspeople engage in what Martin calls integrative thinking, creatively resolving the tension in opposing models by forming entirely new and superior ones. Drawing on stories of leaders as diverse as AG Lafley of Procter & Gamble, Meg Whitman of eBay, Victoria Hale of the Institute for One World Health, and Nandan Nilekani of Infosys, Martin shows how integrative thinkers are relentlessly diagnosing and synthesizing by asking probing questions including: What are the causal relationships at work here? and What are the implied trade-offs? Martin also presents a model for strengthening your integrative thinking skills by drawing on different kinds of knowledge including conceptual and experiential knowledge. Integrative thinking can be learned, and The Opposable Mind helps you master this vital skill.
New York Times Bestseller An exciting--and encouraging--exploration of creativity from the author of When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic "right-brain" thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn't. Drawing on research from around the world, Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others) outlines the six fundamentally human abilities that are absolute essentials for professional success and personal fulfillment--and reveals how to master them. A Whole New Mind takes readers to a daring new place, and a provocative and necessary new way of thinking about a future that's already here.
Basing her approach on historical sources, Rosalie Osmond explores the way the soul has been represented in different cultures and at different times, from ancient Egypt and Greece, through medieval Europe and into the 21st century.
