The Genesis of Creativity and the Origin of the Human Mind PDF Download

Author: Ariela Fradkin Anati
Publisher: Karolinum Press, Charles University
ISBN: 9788024626772
Category : Art and anthropology
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Genesis of Creativity and the Origin of the Human Mind" is a collective monograph which comprises scientific studies written by foremost world experts specialising on evolution of the man, culture and art. Seen from the interdisciplinary perspective, the monograph aspires to describe, analyse and interpret the nascence of artistic creativity and the constitution of the anatomically modern man s mind. It also focuses on the origins of art in the Upper Paleolithic as well as on manifestations of artistic creativity in pre-literary societies and tribal cultures that have preserved until present, e.g. in Southern Africa. The fact that the monograph is a result of works by experts with different specialisations enables us to compare their different approaches to the topic and accentuate the wide array of possible approaches and interpretations of artistic manifestations in a particular historic and cultural context."

Author: Edward O. Wilson
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631493191
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
“Brimming with ideas. . . . The Origins of Creativity approach[es] creativity scientifically but sensitively, feeling its roots without pulling them out.”—Economist In a stirring exploration of human nature recalling his foundational work Consilience, Edward O. Wilson offers a “luminous” (Kirkus Reviews) reflection on the humanities and their integral relationship to science. Both endeavors, Wilson argues, have their roots in human creativity—the defining trait of our species. By studying fields as diverse as paleontology, evolution, and neurobiology, Wilson demonstrates that creative expression began not 10,000 years ago, as we have long assumed, but more than 100,000 years ago in the Paleolithic Age. A provocative investigation into what it means to be human, The Origins of Creativity reveals how the humanities have played an unexamined role in defining our species. With the eloquence, optimism, and pioneering inquiry we have come to expect from our leading biologist, Wilson proposes a transformational “Third Enlightenment” in which the blending of science and humanities will enable a deeper understanding of our human condition, and how it ultimately originated.

Author: David S. Whitley
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1615920560
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Whitley, one of the world's leading experts on cave paintings, rewrites the understanding of shamanism and its connection with artistic creativity, myth, and religion by interweaving archaeological evidence with the latest findings of cutting-edge neuroscience.

Author: Carole Brooks Platt
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
ISBN: 1845408381
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
In 1976, Julian Jaynes proposed that the language of poetry and prophecy originated in the right, "god-side" of the brain. Current neuroscientific evidence confirms the role of the right hemisphere in poetry, a sensed presence, and paranormal claims as well as in mental imbalance. Left-hemispheric dominance for language is the norm. An atypically enhanced right hemisphere, whether attained through genetic predisposition, left-hemispheric damage, epilepsy, childhood or later traumas, can create hypersensitivities along with special skills. Dissociative "Others" may arise unbidden or be coaxed out through occult practices. Based on nearly twenty years of scientific and literary research, this book enters the atypical minds of poetic geniuses - Blake, Keats, Hugo, Rilke, Yeats, Merrill, Plath and Hughes - by way of the visible signs in their lives, beliefs, and shared practices.

Author: Nathalie Gontier
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192543512
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 1185

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Book Description
The biological and neurological capacity to symbolize, and the products of behavioral, cognitive, sociocultural, linguistic, and technological uses of symbols (symbolism), are fundamental to every aspect of human life. The Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution explores the origins of our characteristically human abilities - our ability to speak, create images, play music, and read and write. The book investigates how symbolization evolved in human evolution and how symbolism is expressed across the various areas of human life. The field is intrinsically interdisciplinary - considering findings from fossil studies, scientific research from primatology, developmental psychology, and of course linguistics. Written by world leading experts, thirty-eight topical chapters are grouped into six thematic parts that respectively focus on epistemological, psychological, anthropological, ethological, linguistic, and social-technological aspects of human symbolic evolution. The handbook presents an in-depth but comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the of the state of the art in the science of human symbolic evolution. This work will be of interest to academics and students active in all fields contributing to the study of human evolution.

Author: Tracy B. Henley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429950020
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 605

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Book Description
The remains that archaeologists uncover reveal ancient minds at work as much as ancient hands, and for decades many have sought a better way of understanding those minds. This understanding is at the forefront of cognitive archaeology, a discipline that believes that a greater application of psychological theory to archaeology will further our understanding of the evolution of the human mind. Bringing together a diverse range of experts including archaeologists, psychologists, anthropologists, biologists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, historians, and philosophers, in one comprehensive volume, this accessible and illuminating book is an important resource for students and researchers exploring how the application of cognitive archaeology can significantly and meaningfully deepen their knowledge of early and ancient humans. This seminal volume opens the field of cognitive archaeology to scholars across the behavioral sciences.

Author: Kyra Kaercher
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1789697956
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
The theme for the Cambridge Annual Student Archaeology Conference (CASA) 2019 was New Frontiers in Archaeology and this volume presents papers from a wide range of topics such as new geographical areas of research, using museum collections and legacy data, new ways to teach archaeology and new scientific or theoretic paradigms.

Author: Holmes Rolston
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521646741
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
This book argues that the phenomena of religion can not be reduced to the phenomena of biology.

Author: Robert G. Bednarik
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527500713
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
The many hundreds of books and thousands of academic papers on the topic of Pleistocene (Ice Age) art are limited in their approach because they deal only with the early art of southwestern Europe. This is the first book to offer a comprehensive synthesis of the known Pleistocene palaeoart of six continents, a phenomenon that is in fact more numerous and older in other continents. It contemplates the origins of art in a balanced manner, based on reality rather than fantasies about cultural primacy. Its key findings challenge most previous perceptions in this field and literally re-write the discipline. Despite the eclectic format and its high academic standards, the book addresses the non-specialist as well as the specialist reader. It presents a panorama of the rich history of palaeoart, stretching back more than twenty times as long in time as the cave art of France and Spain. This abundance of evidence is harnessed in presenting a new hypothesis of how early humans began to form and express constructs of reality and thus created the ideational world in which they existed. It explains how art-producing behaviour began and the origins of how humans relate to the world consciously.

Author: Edward O. Wilson
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631495550
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 131

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Book Description
“The book bursts to life with [Wilson’s] observations of nature, from fire ants and social spiders to starlings.”—Aarathi Prasad, New York Times Book Review An “endlessly fascinating” (Michael Ruse) work of scientific thought and synthesis, Genesis is Edward O. Wilson’s twenty-first-century statement on Darwinian evolution. Asserting that religious creeds and philosophical questions can be reduced to purely genetic and evolutionary components, and that the human body and mind have a physical base obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry, Wilson demonstrates that the only way for us to fully understand human behavior is to study the evolutionary histories of nonhuman species. At least seventeen of these species—among them the African naked mole rat and the sponge-dwelling shrimp—have been found to have advanced societies based on altruism and cooperation. Braiding twenty-first- century scientific theory with the lyrical biological and humanistic observations for which Wilson is beloved, Genesis is “a magisterial history of social evolution, from clouds of midges or sparrows to the grotesqueries of ant colonies” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).