Imagination and the Meaningful Brain - Softcover

Modell, Arnold H. H

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262633434 ISBN 13: 9780262633437

Publisher: MIT Press, 2006

Synopsis

The ultimate goal of the cognitive sciences is to understand how the brain works-how it turns "matter into imagination." In Imagination and the Meaningful Brain, psychoanalyst Arnold Modell claims that subjective human experience must be included in any scientific explanation of how the mind/brain works. Contrary to current attempts to describe mental functioning as a form of computation, his view is that the construction of meaning is not the same as information processing. The intrapsychic complexities of human psychology, as observed through introspection and empathic knowledge of other minds, must be added to the third-person perspective of cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Assuming that other mammals are conscious and conscious of their feelings, Modell emphasizes evolutionary continuities and discontinuities of emotion. The limbic system, the emotional brain, is of ancient origin, but only humans have the capacity for generative imagination. By means of metaphor, we are able to interpret, displace, and transform our feelings. To bolster his argument, Modell draws on a variety of disciplines-including psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, neurobiology, evolutionary biology, linguistics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. Only by integrating the objectivity of neuroscience, the phenomenology of introspection, and the intersubjective knowledge of psychoanalysis, he claims, will we be able fully to understand how the mind works.

About this title

Review:

A profound rumination on the perennial problem of how to understand other minds.

--Jung-In Kwon, Journal of Consciousness Studies

About the Author:

Arnold H. Modell is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Andrew Dobson is Professor of Politics at Keele University, UK. He is the author of Justice and the Environment, Green Political Thought, and Citizenship and the Environment.

About this edition

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0262633434
• ISBN 13: 9780262633437
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272