The Artful Mind Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity

All normal human beings alive in the last fifty thousand years appear tohave possessed, in Mark Turner's phrase, "irrepressibly artful minds."Cognitively modern minds produced a staggering list of behavioralsingularities--science, religion, mathematics, language, advanced tool use,decorative dress, dance, culture, art--that seems to indicate a mysterious andunexplained discontinuity between us and all other living things. This brutefact 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 howdo they operate? These are the questions that occupy the distinguishedcontributors to this volume, which emerged from a year-long Getty-fundedresearch project hosted by the Center for Advanced Study in the BehavioralSciences at Stanford. These scholars bring to bear a range of disciplinary andcross-disciplinary perspectives on the relationship between art (broadlyconceived), the mind, and the brain. Together they hope to provide directionsfor a new field of research that can play a significant role in answering thegreat riddle of human singularity.