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Re: Book Review: The Creative Mind
Margaret Boden speculates on the cognitive origin of art, on the internal processes of the mind that make art possible.
Rab mentions two important points from Boden's theory:
- great creative acts always involve pre-existing materials and theories - they don't come from nothing.
- true creativity occurs when somebody questions, changes or eliminates
an existing rule, or shows that something previously thought fixed
might be variable.
However, these are by way of introduction to her main point which is
that creativity is determined by the way in which we follow and
question different cognitive rules. What are these cognitive
ruiles? Rab gave us examples from the rules of analytic
philosophy (e.g. bivalence, validity). Learning these rules
change our perception of the world.
This is interesting, but how profound is it? What is being
suggested is that we all have different rules about how we think the
world works. Some people notice things different about the world
that others haven't, or don't tend to notice. When these people
express themselves artisitcally their work tends to be more powerful.
What i would like to find out more about is,for instance, why some
people are more artistically inclined than others. Surely some
people question common cognitive rules but are not led to express
themselves artistically. Why might this be? My inclination would
be to want to explore the brain for answers. Neuroscientist
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran says in Part of 4 of his Reith Lectures in
2003 on the brain "we want the devils and the details". I
don't want to omit "the exact details required in the brain" as Boden
sems happy to do. That would reduce her idea to little more than
a highly speculative theory.
Lecture 3, 'The Artful Brain', part of 2003 Reith lectures explores a
different and intriguing cognitive theory of art. It also offers
some evidence-based justification.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2003/lecture3.shtml
Felicity