Many films and novels defy our ability to make sense of the plot. While puzzling storytelling, strange incongruities, inviting enigmas and persistent ambiguities have been central to the effects of many literary and cinematic traditions, a great deal of contemporary films and television series bring such qualities to the mainstream-but wherein lies the attractiveness of perplexing works of fiction? This collected volume offers the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and trans-medial approach to the question of cognitive challenge in narrative art, bringing together psychological, philosophical, formal-historical, and empirical perspectives from leading scholars across these fields.

To speak of 'thinking with literature' is to make the assumption that literature (in the broadest sense) is neither a side-show nor a side-issue in human cultures: it belongs to the spectrum of imaginative modes that includes both philosophical and scientific thought. Whether one regards it as a practice or as an archive, literature is highly pervasive, robust, enduring, and pregnant with values. Thinking with Literature argues that what it affords above all is a way of thinking, whether for writer, reader, or critic. Literature constitutes one of the prime instruments of cultural improvisation; it is the embodiment of a powerful, inventive, and ever-changing cognitive agency. As such, it invites a cognitive mode of criticism, one which asserts the priority of the individual literary work as a unique product of human cognition. In this book, discussions of topics, arguments, and hypotheses from the cognitive sciences, philosophy, and the theory of communication are woven into the fabric of a critical analysis which insists on the value of close reading: a poem by Yeats, a scene from Shakespeare, novels by Mme de Lafayette, Conrad, Frantzen, stories from Winnie-the-Pooh, and many others appear here on their own terms, with their own cognitive energies. Written in an accessible style, Thinking with Literature speaks both to mainstream readers of literature and to specialists in cognitive studies.

Uniting E. Thomas Lawson's essays on the cognitive science of religion, this volume explores theoretical issues in the study of cultural phenomena such as religion, the role of imagination, and the experiments that emerge from these theories. The book begins with Lawson's influential essay ‘Towards a Cognitive Science of Religion’, which was the first to employ the phrase, and has since become widely adopted in many different disciplines. It signals to scholars in the humanities that the cognitive revolution has finally reached them and serves to introduce them to the world of science. With both newcomers and established scholars in mind, the book then focuses on theoretical issues in the field, and describes experiments exploring the connections between cognition and culture.

This book explores new developments in the dialogues between science and theatre and offers an introduction to a fast-expanding area of research and practice.The cognitive revolution in the humanities is creating new insights into the audience experience, performance processes and training. Scientists are collaborating with artists to investigate how our brains and bodies engage with performance to create new understanding of perception, emotion, imagination and empathy. Divided into four parts, each introduced by an expert editorial from leading researchers in the field, this edited volume offers readers an understanding of some of the main areas of collaboration and research: 1. Dances with Science 2. Touching Texts and Embodied Performance 3. The Multimodal Actor 4. Affecting Audiences Throughout its history theatre has provided exciting and accessible stagings of science, while contemporary practitioners are increasingly working with scientific and medical material. As Honour Bayes reported in the Guardian in 2011, the relationships between theatre, science and performance are 'exciting, explosive and unexpected'. Affective Performance and Cognitive Science charts new directions in the relations between disciplines, exploring how science and theatre can impact upon each other with reference to training, drama texts, performance and spectatorship. The book assesses the current state of play in this interdisciplinary field, facilitating cross disciplinary exchange and preparing the way for future studies.

This book provides state-of-the-art coverage of research in laboratory phonology, an interdisciplinary research perspective which brings a wide range of experimental and analytic tools to bear on the central questions of how knowledge of spoken language is structured, learned, and used. The book presents works illustrating how laboratory phonology is practiced and highlights promising areas of current research.
Contributions address how laboratory phonology approaches and methodologies have provided insight into human speech and sound structure. Part one introduces the history, nature, and aims of laboratory phonology. The remaining four parts cover central issues in research done within this perspective, as well as methodological resources used for investigating these issues. This Handbook, the first specifically dedicated to the laboratory phonology approach, builds on the foundation of knowledge amassed in linguistics, speech research and allied disciplines. With the varied interdisciplinary contributions collected, the handbook showcases work in this vibrant field.

In recent years, neuroscientists have made ambitious attempts to explain artistic processes and spectatorship through brain imaging techniques. But can brain science really unravel the workings of art? Is the brain in fact the site of aesthetic appreciation? Embodying Art recasts the relationship between neuroscience and aesthetics and calls for shifting the focus of inquiry from the brain itself to personal experience in the world. Chiara Cappelletto presents close readings of neuroscientific and philosophical scholarship as well as artworks and art criticism, identifying their epistemological premises and theoretical consequences. She critiques neuroaesthetic reductionism and its assumptions about a mind/body divide, arguing that the brain is embodied and embedded in affective, cultural, and historical milieus. Cappelletto considers understandings of the human brain encompassing scientific, philosophical, and visual and performance arts discourses. She examines how neuroaesthetics has constructed its field of study, exploring the ways digital renderings and scientific data have been used to produce the brain as a cultural and visual object. Tracing the intertwined histories of brain science and aesthetic theory, Embodying Art offers a strikingly original and profound philosophical account of the human brain as a living artifact.

An anniversary edition of the classic work that influenced a generation of neuroscientists and cognitive neuroscientists. Before The Computational Brain was published in 1992, conceptual frameworks for brain function were based on the behavior of single neurons, applied globally. In The Computational Brain, Patricia Churchland and Terrence Sejnowski developed a different conceptual framework, based on large populations of neurons. They did this by showing that patterns of activities among the units in trained artificial neural network models had properties that resembled those recorded from populations of neurons recorded one at a time. It is one of the first books to bring together computational concepts and behavioral data within a neurobiological framework. Aimed at a broad audience of neuroscientists, computer scientists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers, The Computational Brain is written for both expert and novice. This anniversary edition offers a new preface by the authors that puts the book in the context of current research. This approach influenced a generation of researchers. Even today, when neuroscientists can routinely record from hundreds of neurons using optics rather than electricity, and the 2013 White House BRAIN initiative heralded a new era in innovative neurotechnologies, the main message of The Computational Brain is still relevant.

In this important and original book, eminent scholar Barbara Herrnstein Smith describes, assesses, and reflects upon a set of contemporary intellectual projects involving science, religion, and human cognition. One, which Smith calls "the New Naturalism," is the effort to explain religion on the basis of cognitive science. Another, which she calls "the New Natural Theology," is the attempt to reconcile natural-scientific accounts of the world with traditional religious belief. These two projects, she suggests, are in many ways mirror images--or "natural reflections"--of each other. Examining these and related efforts from the perspective of a constructivist-pragmatist epistemology, Smith argues that crucial aspects of belief--religious and other--that remain elusive or invisible under dominant rationalist and computational models are illuminated by views of human cognition that stress its dynamic, embodied, and interactive features. She also demonstrates how constructivist understandings of the formation and stabilization of knowledge--scientific and other--alert us to similarities in the springs of science and religion that are elsewhere seen largely in terms of difference and contrast. In "Natural Reflections, "Smith develops a sophisticated approach to issues often framed only polemically. Recognizing science and religion as complex, distinct domains of human practice, she also insists on their significant historical connections and cognitive continuities and offers important new modes of engagement with each of them.

An investigation of how children balance rules and exceptions when they learn languages. All languages have exceptions alongside overarching rules and regularities. How does a young child tease them apart within just a few years of language acquisition? In this book, drawing an economic analogy, Charles Yang argues that just as the price of goods is determined by the balance between supply and demand, the price of linguistic productivity arises from the quantitative considerations of rules and exceptions. The learner postulates a productive rule only if it results in a more efficient organization of language, with the number of exceptions falling below a critical threshold. Supported by a wide range of cases with corpus evidence, Yang's Tolerance Principle gives a unified account of many long-standing puzzles in linguistics and psychology, including why children effortlessly acquire rules of language that perplex otherwise capable adults. His focus on computational efficiency provides novel insight on how language interacts with the other components of cognition and how the ability for language might have emerged during the course of human evolution.

"One of the pioneers of the cognitive science of religion, adds insight to the interdisciplinary discussion in this provocatively titled work .... McCauley's work is erudite, precise, well argued."-Library Journal The battle between religion and science, competing methods of knowing ourselves and our world, has been raging for many centuries. Now scientists themselves are looking at cognitive foundations of religion-and arriving at some surprising conclusions. Over the course of the past two decades, scholars have employed insights gleaned from cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and related disciplines to illuminate the study of religion. In Why Religion is Natural and Science Is Not, Robert N. McCauley, one of the founding fathers of the cognitive science of religion, argues that our minds are better suited to religious belief than to scientific inquiry. Drawing on the latest research and illustrating his argument with commonsense examples, McCauley argues that religion has existed for many thousands of years in every society because the kinds of explanations it provides are precisely the kinds that come naturally to human minds. Science, on the other hand, is a much more recent and rare development because it reaches radical conclusions and requires a kind of abstract thinking that only arises consistently under very specific social conditions. Religion makes intuitive sense to us, while science requires a lot of work. McCauley then draws out the larger implications of these findings. The naturalness of religion, he suggests, means that science poses no real threat to it, while the unnaturalness of science puts it in a surprisingly precarious position. Rigorously argued and elegantly written, this provocative book will appeal to anyone interested in the ongoing debate between religion and science, and in the nature and workings of the human mind.

This book fills a long standing need for a basic introduction to Cognitive Grammar that is current, authoritative, comprehensive, and approachable. It presents a synthesis that draws together and refines the descriptive and theoretical notions developed in this framework over the course of three decades. In a unified manner, it accommodates both the conceptual and the social-interactive basis of linguistic structure, as well as the need for both functional explanation and explicit structural description. Starting with the fundamentals, essential aspects of the theory are systematically laid out with concrete illustrations and careful discussion of their rationale. Among the topics surveyed are conceptual semantics, grammatical classes, grammatical constructions, the lexicon-grammar continuum characterized as assemblies of symbolic structures (form-meaning pairings), and the usage-based account of productivity, restrictions, and well-formedness. The theory's central claim - that grammar is inherently meaningful - is thereby shown to be viable. The framework is further elucidated through application to nominal structure, clause structure, and complex sentences. These are examined in broad perspective, with exemplification from English and numerous other languages. In line with the theory's general principles, they are discussed not only in terms of their structural characterization, but also their conceptual value and functional motivation. Other matters explored include discourse, the temporal dimension of language structure, and what grammar reveals about cognitive processes and the construction of our mental world.

How can we account for the sudden appearance of such dazzling artists and scientists as Mozart, Shakespeare, Darwin, or Einstein? How can we define such genius? What conditions or personality traits seem to produce exceptionally creative people? Is the association between genius and madness really just a myth? These and many other questions are brilliantly illuminated in The Origins of Genius. Dean Simonton convincingly argues that creativity can best be understood as a Darwinian process of variation and selection. The artist or scientist generates a wealth of ideas, and then subjects these ideas to aesthetic or scientific judgment, selecting only those that have the best chance to survive and reproduce. Indeed, the true test of genius is the ability to bequeath an impressive and influential body of work to future generations. Simonton draws on the latest research into creativity and explores such topics as the personality type of the genius, whether genius is genetic or produced by environment and education, the links between genius and mental illness (Darwin himself was emotionally and mentally unwell), the high incidence of childhood trauma, especially loss of a parent, amongst Nobel Prize winners, the importance of unconscious incubation in creative problem-solving, and much more. Simonton substantiates his theory by examining and quoting from the work of such eminent figures as Henri Poincare, W. H. Auden, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Charles Darwin, Niels Bohr, and many others. For anyone intrigued by the spectacular feats of the human mind, The Origins of Genius offers a revolutionary new way of understanding the very nature of creativity.

How are we to understand the actor's work as a fully embodied process? 'Embodied cognition' is a branch of contemporary philosophy which attempts to frame human understanding as a fully embodied interaction with the environment. Engaging with ideas of contemporary significance from neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, and philosophy, Why Do Actors Train? challenges outmoded mind/body dualistic notions that permeate common conceptions of how actors work. Theories of embodiment are drawn up to shed important light on the ways and reasons actors do what they do. Through detailed, step-by-step analyses of specific actor-training exercises, the author examines the tools that actors use to perform roles. This book provides theatre practitioners with a new lens to re-examine their craft, offering a framework to understand the art form as one that is fundamentally grounded in embodied experience.

In this classic work, John Steinbruner argues that the time is ripe for exploration of a new theoretical perspective on the decision-making process in government. He suggests that the cybernetic theory of decision as developed in such diverse fields as information theory, mathematical logic, and behavioral psychology generates a systematic but non-rational analysis that seems to explain quite naturally decisions that are puzzling when viewed from the rational perspective. When combined with the basic understanding of human mental operations developed in cognitive psychology, the cybernetic theory of decision presents a striking picture of how decision makers deal with the intense uncertainty and fundamental value conflicts that arise in bureaucratic politics. To illustrate the advantages of using cybernetic theory, Steinbruner analyzes the issue of sharing nuclear weapons among the NATO allies.

A groundbreaking new look at how we pay attention that can help us perform better - and be happier - in the digital world. Psychologist Gloria Mark began researching how technology affects human attention when offices were first getting computers. Over the last 30 years, she has tracked changes in our attention spans and stress levels, and in the fundamental way our brains process information. Now in Attention Span, Dr Mark shows how much of what we think we know about attention is wrong. She explores the current crisis of focus and productivity that is so deeply entwined with rising rates of anxiety and depression, and investigates what we might be able to do about it. Delving into the newly celebrated concept of 'kinetic attention', she introduces a more balanced understanding of the rhythm between deep focus and less focused states, which may actually serve to make us happier and more productive in the long term.

This edited book offers a broad selection of interdisciplinary studies within cognitive science. The book illustrates and documents how cognitive science offers a unifying framework for the interaction of fields of study focusing on the human mind from linguistics and philosophy to psychology and the history of science. A selection of renowned contributors provides authoritative historical, theoretical and empirical perspectives on more than six decades of research with a special focus on the progress of cognitive science in Central Europe. Readers encounter a bird's eye view of geographical and linguistic diversity brought about by the cognitive revolution, as it is reflected in the writings of leading authors, many of whom are former students and collaborators of Csaba Pleh, a key figure of the cognitive turn in Central Europe, to whom this book is dedicated. The book appeals to students and researchers looking for the ways various approaches to the mind and the brain intersect.

Executive functions develop during the first years of life and determine future learning and personal development. Executive dysfunction is related to various neurodevelopmental disorders, so its study is of great interest for intervention in children with neurotypical development and in those who have suffered a neurodevelopmental disorder. The Handbook of Research on Neurocognitive Development of Executive Functions and Implications for Intervention offers updated research on executive functions and their implication in psychoeducational intervention. It establishes a multidisciplinary context to discuss both intervention experience and research results in different areas of knowledge. Covering topics such as childhood inhibitory processing, mindfulness interventions, and language development, this major reference work is an excellent resource for psychologists, medical professionals, researchers, academicians, educators, and students.

Toward a Holistic Intelligence: Life on the Other Side of the Digital Barrier is a critical examination of how the Internet, our current digital age, and people's continuous use of digital devices is adversely affecting their thought processes, working memories, attention spans, and overall level of intelligence. In doing so, it explores how a larger intelligence based primarily on direct insight and creative absorption, qualities which are integrally part of people's emotive and sensorial lives, might allow for a clearer exploration of their world and themselves at a time in which our cognitive lives are being so thoroughly abrogated by the Internet and its resultant technologies.

This Book is comprised of solutions for the treatment of cognitive diseases with Bionics or Bioinspired Algorithms using future technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), data science, and more. Studying the behavior of nature and providing the medical engineering solutions would not only be unique but would result in substantial contribution in solution of so many cognitive disease problems which are not detected correctly in initial stages. This publication would be a breakthrough in the field of medical science, especially in the field of cognitive diseases by providing solutions in the form of algorithms and devices that could be useful for the brain disease patient for early detection. This book is essential for various medical research centers, engineering institutions across the world, medical colleges, biomedical research centers, and electronics and communication research centers.

Toward a Holistic Intelligence: Life on the Other Side of the Digital Barrier is a critical examination of how the Internet, our current digital age, and people's continuous use of digital devices is adversely affecting their thought processes, working memories, attention spans, and overall level of intelligence. In doing so, it explores how a larger intelligence based primarily on direct insight and creative absorption, qualities which are integrally part of people's emotive and sensorial lives, might allow for a clearer exploration of their world and themselves at a time in which our cognitive lives are being so thoroughly abrogated by the Internet and its resultant technologies.

One of the most exciting theories to emerge from cognitive science research over the past few decades has been Douglas Hofstadter's notion of "strange loops," from Goedel, Escher, Bach (1979). Hofstadter is also an active literary translator who has written about translation, perhaps most notably in his 1997 book Le Ton Beau de Marot, where he draws on his cognitive science research. And yet he has never considered the possibility that translation might itself be a strange loop. In this book Douglas Robinson puts Hofstadter's strange-loops theory into dialogue with a series of definitive theories of translation, in the process showing just how cognitively and affectively complex an activity translation actually is.

This book deals with the complexity of art by focusing on the singularity of the work of art. Gathering a selection of writings in art theory and semiotics, it explores the question of apprehending art from its perceptual aspects to aesthetic comprehension and understanding. Theoretical enquiries focus in particular on the dynamics of the perception of forms, the semiotic value of colour, the aesthetic phenomenon of empathy, the function of vision in relation to other senses and its faculty to lead, in a substantial way, to the embodiment of sense. These theoretical points are constantly observed with reference to the analysis of works of art, especially from the beginning of the modern era, when a renovated psychophysical approach oriented the evolution of contemporary aesthetics. Research into art theories sheds light on how differentials in topologic positions, dimensions, relationships and tones contribute to the arising of forms and colours in perception, and affect the perceiver. The essays presented address in different ways the emergence of sense, by conceiving it as deeply anchored to the dynamics of perception, in addition to the cognitive disposition and knowledge, regardless of whether or not the subject (artist or beholder) is aware of these processes. Through in-depth analyses identifying to what extent the aesthetic moment builds on perceptual and semiotic processes, works of art are revealed to be singularities, reflecting the correlation with morphodynamics in the sciences.

In psychology, cognitive load refers to the used amount of working memory resources. This book contains four chapters that each provide a unique perspective on the theory of cognitive load. Chapter One describes the use of multi-media software packages in an educational context and the impact of multi-modal teaching methods on cognitive load. Chapter Two presents the results of a study that sought to determine whether the inverse method is better than the balance method for learning to solve linear equations with a negative pronumeral within the framework of cognitive load theory. Chapter Three discusses how teaching writing skills could benefit from considering cognitive load effects and techniques with clear cognitive load implications when designing pedagogical practices. Chapter Four introduces human cognitive architecture as the basis of cognitive load theory and summarizes the cognitive load effects that apply in teaching mathematics.